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RENAISSANCE IN ITALY 

THE FINE ARTS 

BY 

JOHN ADDINGTON SYMONDS 

AUTHOR OF 

'^AN INTRODUCTION TO THE STUDY OF DANTE,' ' STUDIES OF THE GREEK POETS.' 

AND ' SKETCHES IN ITALY AND GREECE.' 



Dii Romae indigetes, Trojae tuque auctor, ApoUa 
Unde genus nostrum coeli se toUit ad astra, 
Hanc saltern auferri laudem prohibete Latinis: 
Artibus emineat semper, studiisque Minervce, 
Italia, et gentes doceat pulcherrima Roma ; 
Quandoquidem armorum penitus fortuna recessit, 
Tanta Italos inter crevit discordia reges ; 
Ipsi nos inter ssevos distringimus enses, 
Nee patriam pudet extemis aperire tyrannis. 

ViDA, Poetica^ lib, iL 




NEW YORK 

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 

1908 






AUTHOR'S EDITION 






AUTHOR'S NOTE TO THE AMERICAN EDITION. 

This book is one of the three written on the '* Re- 
naissance in Italy.'' The other two are respectively 
called " The Age of the Despots" and '' The Revival 
of Learning." They deal with the politics and the 
scholarship of the period. A fourth book is being 
written on " Italian Literature." 

Though these books taken together and in the 
order planned by the author form one connected 
study of Italian culture at a certain period of his- 
tory, still each aims at a completeness of its own, 
and each can be read independently of its com- 
panions. That the author does not regard acquaint- 
ance with any one of them as essential to a profit- 
able reading of any other has been shown by the 
publication of each with a separate title-page and 
without numeration of the volumes, while all three 
bear the same general heading of '' Renaissance in 
Italy." 



PREFACE. 



This third volume of my book on the Renaissance 
in Italy does not pretend to retrace the history of 
the Italian arts, but rather to define their relation 
to the main movement of Renaissance culture. 
Keeping this, the chief object of my whole work, 
steadily in view, I have tried to explain the de- 
pendence of the arts on mediaeval Christianity at 
their commencement, their gradual emancipation 
from ecclesiastical control, and their final attain- 
ment of freedom at the moment when the classical 
revival culminated. 

Not to notice the mediaeval period in this evo- 
lution would be impossible ; since the revival of 
Sculpture and Painting at the end of the thir- 
teenth century was among the earliest signs of 
that new intellectual birth to which we give the 
title of Renaissance. I have, therefore, had to 
deal at some length with stages in the develop- 
ment of Architecture, Sculpture, and Painting, 



vi PREFACE, 

which form a prelude to the proper age of my 
own history. 

In studying the architectural branch of the 
subject, I have had recourse to Fergusson's Illus- 
trated Handbook of Architecture, to Burckhardt's 
Cicerone, to Grliner's Terra-Cotta Buildings of 
North Italy, to Milizia's Memorie degli Architetti, 
and to many illustrated works on single buildings 
in Rome, Tuscany, Lombardy, and Venice. For 
the history of Sculpture I have used Burckhardt's 
Cicerone and the two important works of Charles 
C. Perkins, entitled Tuscan Sculptors and Italian 
Sculptors, Such books as Le Tre Porte del Bat- 
tistero di Firenze, Griiner's Cathedral of Orvieto, 
and Lasinio's Tabernacolo della Madonna d'Or- 
sammichele have been helpful by their illustrations. 
For the history of Painting I have made use prin- 
cipally of Vasari's Vite de piu eccellenti Pittori, 
etc., in Le Monnier's edition of Crowe and Ca- 
valcaselle's History of Painting, of Burckhardt's 
Cicerone, of Rosini's illustrated Storia della Pit- 
tura Italiana, of Rio's LArt Chretien, and of 
Henri Beyle's Histoire de la Peinture en Italie. I 
should, however, far exceed the limits of a pref- 
ace were I to make a list of all the books I 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER I. 

THE PROBLEM FOR THE FINE ARTS. 

PAGE 

Art in Italy and Greece — The Leading Phase of Culture — ^^s- 
thetic Type of Literature — Painting the Supreme Italian Art 
•^^ — Its Task in the Renaissance — Christian and Classical Tradi- 
tions — Sculpture for the Ancients — Painting for the Romance 
Nations — Mediaeval Faith and Superstition — The Promise of 
Painting — How far can the Figurative Arts express Christian 
Ideas ? — Greek and Christian Religion — Plastic Art incapable 
of solving the Problem — A more Emotional Art needed — 
Place of Sculpture in the Renaissance — Painting and Christian 
Story — Humanization of Ecclesiastical Ideas by Art — Hostility 
of the Spirit of True Piety to Art — Compromises effected by 

^the Church — Fra Bartolommeo's S. Sebastian — Irreconcilability 

of Art and Theology, Art and Philosophy — Recapitulation — 
Art in the end Paganizes — Music — The Future of Painting 
after the Renaissance . . . . . . i 

CHAPTER II. 

ARCHITECTURE. 

Architecture of Mediaeval Italy — Milan, Genoa, Venice — ^The Des- 
pots as Builders — Diversity of Styles— Local Influences — Lom- 
bard, Tuscan Romanesque, Gothic — Italian want of feeling for 
Gothic — Cathedrals of Siena and Orvieto— Secular Buildings 
of the Middle Ages — Florence and Venice — Private Palaces 
— Public Halls — Palazzo della Signoria at Florence — Amolfo 
di Cambio — S. Maria del Fiore — Brunelleschi's Dome — Classi- 



CONTENTS, 

PAGB 

cal revival in Architecture— Roman Ruins — Three Periods in 
Renaissance Architecture — Their Characteristics — Brunelleschi 
— Alberti — Palace-building — Michellozzo — Decorative v^ork 
of the Revival— Bramante — Vitoni's Church of the Umilta at 
Pistoja — Palazzo del Te — Villa Famesina — Sansovino at Venice 
— Michael Angelo — The Building of S.Peter's — Palladio — The 
Palazzo della Ragione at Vicenza — Lombard Architects — Theo- 
rists and students of Vitruvius — Vignola and Scamozzi — Euro- 
pean influence of the Palladian style — Comparison of Scholars 
and Architects in relation to the Revival of Learning . . 40 



CHAPTER in. 

SCULPTURE. 

Niccola Pisano — Obscurity of the sources for a History of Early 
Italian Sculpture — Vasari's Legend of Pisano — Deposition from 
the Cross at Lucca — Study of Nature and the Antique — Sar- 
cophagus at Pisa — Pisan Pulpit — Niccola's School — Giovanni 
Pisano — Pulpit in S. Andrea at Pistoja — Fragments of his work 
at Pisa — Tomb of Benedict XL at Perugia — Bass-reliefs at 
Orvieto — Andrea Pisano — Relation of Sculpture to Painting — 
Giotto — Subordination of Sculpture to Architecture in Italy — 
Pisano's Influence in Venice — Balduccio of Pisa — Orcagna — 
The Tabernacle of Orsammichele — The Gates of the Floren- 
tine Baptistery — Competition of Ghiberti, Brunelleschi, and 
Della Querela — Comparison of Ghiberti's and Brunelleschi's 
Trial-pieces — Comparison of Ghiberti and Della Querela — The 
Bass-reliefs of S. Petronio — Ghiberti's Education — His Picto- 
rial Style in Bass-relief — His feeling for the Antique — Donatel- 
lo — Early Visit to Rome — Christian subjects — Realistic Treat- 
ment — S. George and David — Judith — Equestrian Statue of 
Gattamelata— Influence of Donatello's NaturaHsm — Andrea 
Verocchio — His David — Statue of Colleoni — Alessandro Leo- 
pard! — Lionardo's Statue of Francesco Sforza — The Pollajuoli — 
Tombs of Sixtus IV. and Innocent VIII. — Luca della Robbia 
— His Treatment of Glazed Earthenware — Agostino di Duccio 
—The Oratory of S. Bernardino at Perugia — Antonio Rossel- 
lino — Matteo Civitali — Mino da Fiesole — Benedetto da Majano 
— Characteristics and Masterpieces of this Group — Sepulchral 
Monuments — Andrea Contucci's Tombs in S. Maria del Popolo 



CONTENTS. li 

PAGB 

^ — Desiderio da Settignano — Sculpture in S. Francesco at Rimi- 
ni— -Venetian Sculpture — Verona — Guido Mazzoni of Modena 
— Certosa of Pavia — Colleoni Chapel at Bergamo — Sansovino at 
Venice — Pagan Sculpture— Michael Angelo's Scholars — Baccio 
Bandinelli — Bartolommeo Ammanati — Cellini — Gian Bologna 
— Survey of the History of Renaissance Sculpture . . loo 

CHAPTER IV. 

PAINTING. 

Distribution of Artistic Gifts in Italy — Florence and Venice — 
Classification by Schools — Stages in the Evolution of Painting 
— Cimabue — The Rucellai Madonna — Giotto — His v^ridespread 
Activity — ^The Scope of his Art — Vitality — Composition — 
Color — Naturalism — Healthiness — Frescoes at Assisi and Pa- 
dua — Legend of S. Francis — The Giotteschi — Pictures of the 
Last Judgment — Orcagna in the Strozzi Chapel — Ambrogio 
Lorenzetti at Pisa — Dogmatic Theology — Capella degli Spag- 
nuoli — Traini's * Triumph of S. Thomas Aquinas ' — Political 
Doctrine expressed in Fresco — Sala della Pace at Siena — 
Religious Art in Siena and Perugia — The Relation of the 
Giottesque Painters to the Renaissance . • . . j8o 



CHAPTER V. 

PAINTINa 

Mediaeval Motives exhausted — New Impulse toward Technical 
Perfection — Naturalists in Painting — Intermediate Achieve- 
ment needed for the Great Age of Art — Positive Spirit of the 
Fifteenth Century — Masaccio — The Modem Manner — Paolo 
Uccello — Perspective — Realistic Painters — The Model — Piero 
della Francesca — His Study of Form — Resurrection at Borgo 
San Sepolcro — Melozzo da Forli — Squarcione at Padua — Gen- 
tile da Fabriano — Fra Angelico — Benozzo Gozzoli — His Deco- 
rative Style — Lippo Lippi — Frescoes at Prato and Spoleto — 
Filippino Lippi — Sandro Botticelli — His value for the Student 
of Renaissance Fancy — His feeling for Mythology — Piero di 
Cosimo — Domenico Ghirlandajo — In what Sense he sums up 



XI CONTENTS, 

PAGB 

the Age — Prosaic Spirit — Florence hitherto supreme in Paint- 
ing — Extension of Art activity throughout Italy — Medicean 
Patronage ....... 22d 

CHAPTER VI. 

PAINTING. 

Two Periods in the True Renaissance — Andrea Mantegna — 
His Statuesque Design — His Naturalism — Roman Inspira- 
tion — Triumph of Julius Caesar — Bass-Reliefs — Luca Signorelli 
— The Precursor of Michael Angelo — Anatomical Studies — 
Sense of Beauty — The Chapel of S. Brizio at Orvieto — Its 
Arabesques and Medallions — Degrees in his Ideal — ^Enthusi- 
asm for Organic Life — Mode of treating Classical Subjects — 
Perugino — His Pietistic Style — His Formalism — The Psycho- 
logical Problem of his Life — Perugino's Pupils — Pinturicchio — 
At Spello and Siena — Francia — Fra Bartolommeo — Transition 
to the Golden Age— Lionardo da Vinci — The Magician of the 
Renaissance — Raphael — The Melodist — Correggio — The Faun 
—Michael Angelo — The Prophet .... 266 

CHAPTER VII. 

VENETIAN PAINTING. 

Painting bloomed late in Venice — Conditions offered by Venice 
to Art — Shelley and Pietro Aretino — Political Circumstances of 
Venice — Comparison with Florence — The Ducal Palace — Art 
regarded as an adjunct to State Pageantry — Myth of Venezia 
— Heroic Deeds of Venice — Tintoretto's Paradise and Guardi's 
Picture of a Ball — Early Venetian Masters of Murano — Gian 
Bellini — Carpaccio's little Angels — The Madonna of S. Zac- 
caria — Giorgione — Allegory, Idyl, Expression of Emotion — 
The Monk at the Clavichord — Titian, Tintoret, and Veronese 
— Tintoretto's Attempt to dramatize Venetian Art — Veronese's 
Mundane Splendor — Titian's Sophoclean Harmony — Their 
Schools — Further Characteristics of Veronese — of Tintoretto — 
His Imaginative Energy — Predominant Poetry — Titian's Per- 
fection of Balance — Assumption of Madonna — Spirit common 
to the Great Venetians ...... 347 



CONTENTS. xiii 

CHAPTER VIII. 

LIFE OF MICHAEL ANGELO. 

PAOB 

Contrast of Michael Angelo and Cellini — Parentage and Boyhood 
of Michael Angelo — Work with Ghirlandajo — Gardens of S. 
Marco — The Medicean Circle — Early Essays in Sculpture — 
Visit to Bologna— First Visit to Rome— The ' PietS' of S. 
Peter's — Michael Angelo as a Patriot and a Friend of the 
Medici — Cartoon for the Battle of Pisa — Michael Angelo and 
Julius II. — The Tragedy of the Tomb — Design for the Pope's 
Mausoleum — Visit to Carrara — Flight from Rome — Michael 
Angelo at Bologna — Bronze Statue of Julius — Return to Rome 
— Ceiling of the Sistine Chapel — Greek and Modern Art — 
Raphael — Michael Angelo and Leo X. — S. Lorenzo — The New 
Sacristy — Circumstances under which it was designed and 
partly finished — Meaning of the Allegories — Incomplete State 
of Michael Angelo's Marbles — Paul III.— The ' Last Judgment ' 
— Critiques of Contemporaries — The Dome of S. Peter's — Vit- 
toria Colonna — Tommaso Cavalieri — Personal Habits of 
Michael Angelo — His Emotional Nature — Last Illness . . 384 



CHAPTER IX. 

LIFE OF BENVENUTO CELLINI. 

His Fame — His Autobiography— Its Value for the Student of 
History, Manners, and Character in the Renaissance — Birth, 
Parentage, and Boyhood — Flute-playing — Apprenticeship to 
Marcone — ^Wanderjahr — The Goldsmith's Trade at Florence 
— Torrigiani and England — Cellini leaves Florence for Rome 
—Quarrel with the Guasconti — Homicidal Fury — Cellini a Law 
to himself — Three Periods in his Manhood — Life in Rome — 
Diego at the Banquet — Renaissance Feeling for Physical Beauty 
— Sack of Rome — Miracles in Cellini's Life— His Affections — 
Murder of his Brother's Assassin — Sanctuary— Pardon and Ab- 
solution — Incantation in the Colosseum— First Visit to France — 
Adventures on the Way — Accused of Stealing Crown Jewels in 
Rome — Imprisonment in the Castle of S. Angelo — The Gover- 
nor—Cellini's Escape— His Visions— The Nature of his Reli- 
gion — Second Visit to France — The Wandering Court — Le Petit 



7dv CONTENTS. 

PAfiB 

Nesle — Cellini in the French Law Courts — Scene at Fontaine- 
bleau — Return to Florence— Cosimo de' Medici as a Patron — 
Intrigues of a Petty Court — Bandinelli — The Duchess — Statue 
of Perseus— End of Cellini's Life — Cellini and Machiavelli , 437 

CHAPTER X 
THE EPIGONI. 

Full Development and Decline of Painting — ^Exhaustion of the old 
Motives — Relation of Lionardo to his Pupils — His Legacy to the 
Lombard School — Bernardino Luini — Gaudenzio Ferrari — The 
Devotion of the Sacri Monti — The School of Raphael — Nothing 
left but Imitation — Unwholesome Influences of Rome— Giulio 
Romano — Michael Angelesque Mannerists — Misconception of 
Michael Angelo — Correggio founds no School — Parmigianino — 
Macchinisti — The Bolognese — After-growth of Art in Florence 
—Andrea del Sarto — His Followers — Pontormo— Bronzino — Re- 
vival of Painting in Siena — Sodoma — His Influence on Pacchia, 
Beccafumi, Peruzzi — Garofalo and Dosso Dossi at Ferrara — 
The Campi at Cremona — Brescia and Bergamo — The Deca- 
dence in the second half of the Sixteenth Century — The Coun- 
ter-Reformation — Extinction of the Renaissance Impulse , 481 



APPENDICES. 

I.— The Pulpits of Pisa and Ravello . . , .507 

II. — Michael Angelo's Sonnets . , • , .512 

III. — Chronological Tables . • • • r . 529 



RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 



CHAPTER I. 

THE PROBLEM FOR THE FINE ARTS. 

Art in Italy and Greece — The Leading Phase of Culture — ^^sthetic 
Type of Literature — Painting the Supreme Italian Art — Its Task 
in the Renaissance — Christian and Classical Traditions — Sculpture 
for the Ancients — Painting for the Romance Nations — Mediaeval 
Faith and Superstition — The Promise of Painting — How far can 
the Figurative Arts express Christian Ideas ? — Greek and' Christian 
Religion — Plastic Art incapable of solving the Problem — A more 
Emotional Art needed — Place of Sculpture in the Renaissance — 
Painting and Christian Story — Humanization of Ecclesiastical 
Ideas by Art — Hostility of the Spirit of True Piety to Art — Com- 
promises effetted by the Church — Fra Bartolommeo's S. Sebastian 
— Irreconcilability of Art and Theology, Art and Philosophy — Re- 
capitulation — Art in the end Paganizes — Music — ^The Future of 
Painting after the Renaissance. 

It has been granted only to two nations, the Greeks 
and the Itahans, and to the latter only at the time of 
the Renaissance, to invest every phase and variety of 
intellectual energy with the form of art. Nothing 
notable was produced in Italy between the thirteenth 
and the seventeenth centuries that did not bear the 
stamp and character of fine art. If the methods of 
science may be truly sai^to regulate our modes of 



2 RENAISSANCE IN ITAL V. 

thinking at the present time, it is no less true th.At, 
during the Renaissance, art exercised a like control- 
ling influence. Not only was each department of 
the fine arts practiced with singular success ; not only 
was the national genius to a very large extent ab- 
sorbed in painting, sculpture, and architecture ; but 
the aesthetic impulse was more subtly and widely 
diffused than this alone would imply. It possessed 
the Italians in the very center of their intellectual 
vitality, imposing its conditions on all the manifes- 
tations of their thought and feeling, so that even 
their shortcomings may be ascribed in a great meas- 
ure to their inability to quit the aesthetic point of 
view. 

We see this in their literature. It is probable 
that none but artistic natures will ever render full 
justice to the poetry of the Renaissance, Critics 
endowed with a less lively sensibility to beauty of 
outline and to harmony of form than the Itahans 
complain that their poetry lacks substantial quali- 
ties ; nor is it except by long familiarity with the 
plastic arts of their contemporaries that we come to 
understand the ground assumed by Ariosto and 
Poliziano. We then perceive that these poets were 
not so much unable as instinctively unwilling to go 
beyond a certain circle of effects. They subordinated 
their work to the ideal of their age, and that ideal was 
one to which a painter rather than a poet might 



ESTHETIC ENTHUSIASM. 3 

successfully aspire. A succession of pictures, hai 
moniously composed and delicately toned to please 
the mental eye, satisfied the taste of the Italians. 
But, however exquisite in design, rich in color, and 
complete in execution this literary work may be, it 
strikes a Northern student as wanting in the highest 
elements of genius — sublimity of imagination, dra- 
matic passion, energy and earnestness of purpose. 
In like manner, he finds it hard to appreciate those 
didactic compositions on trifling or prosaic themes 
which delighted the Italians for the very reason that 
their workmanship surpassed their matter. These 
defects, as we judge them, are still more apparent in 
the graver branches of literature. In an essay or a 
treatise we do not so much care for well-balanced 
disposition of parts or beautifully-rounded periods, 
though elegance may be thought essential to classic 
masterpieces, as for weighty matter and trenchant 
observations. Having the latter, we can dispense 
at need with the former. The Italians of the Re- 
naissance, under the sway of the fine arts, sought 
after form, and satisfied themselves with rhetoric. 
Therefore we condemn their moral disquisitions and 
their criticisms as the flimsy playthings of intellectual 
voluptuaries. Yet the right way of doing justice to 
these stylistic trifles is to regard them as products; 
of an all-embracing genius for art, in a people whose 
most serious enthusiasms were aesthetic. 



4 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

The speech of the Italians at that epoch, their 
social habits, their ideal of manners, their standard 
of morality, the estimate they formed of men, were 
alike conditioned and qualified by art. It was an age 
of splendid ceremonies and magnificent parade, when 
the furniture of houses, the armor of soldiers, the 
dress of citizens, the pomp of war, and the pageantry 
of festival were invariably and inevitably beautiful. 
On the meanest articles of domestic utility, cups and 
platters, door-panels and chimney-pieces, coverlets for 
beds and lids of linen-chests, a wealth of artistic inven- 
tion was lavished by innumerable craftsmen, no less 
skilled in technical details than distinguished by rare 
taste. From the Pope upon St. Peter's chair to the 
clerks in a Florentine counting-house, every Italian 
was a judge of art. Art supplied the spiritual oxygen, 
without which the life of the Renaissance must have 
been atrophied. During that period of prodigious 
^tivity the entire nation seemed to be endowed with 
an instinct for the beautiful, and with the capacity 
for producing it in every conceivable form. As we 
travel through Italy at the present day, when * time, 
war, pillage, and purchase ' have done their worst to 
denude the country of its treasures, we still marvel 
at the incomparable and countless beauties stored in 
every burgh and hamlet. Pacing the picture-galleries 
of Northern Europe, the country-seats of English 
nobles, and the palaces of Spain, the same reflection 



METHOD OF TREATMENT, 5 

IS Still forced upon us: how could Italy have done 
what she achieved within so short a space of time ? 
What must the houses and the churches once have 
been from which these spoils were taken, but which 
still remain so rich in masterpieces? Psychologi- 
cally to explain this universal capacity for the fine 
arts in the nation at this epoch is perhaps impos- 
sible. Yet the fact remains, that he who would com- 
prehend the Italians of the Renaissance must study 
their art, and cling fast to that Ariadne-thread 
throughout the labyrinthine windings of national 
character. He must learn to recognize that herein 
lay the sources of their intellectual strength as well 
as the secret of their intellectual weakness. 

It lies beyond the scope of this work to embrace 
in one inquiry the different forms of art in Italy, or 
to analyze the connection of the aesthetic instinct 
with the manifold manifestations of the Renaissance. 
Even the narrower task to which I must confine 
myself is too vast for the limits I am forced to 
impose upon its treatment. I intend to deal with 
Italian painting as the one complete product which 
remains from the achievements of this period, touch- 
ing upon sculpture and architecture more super- 
ficially. Not only is painting the art in which the 
Italians among all the nations of the world stand 
unapproachably alone, but it is also the one that best 
enables us to gauge their genius at the time when 



6 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

they impressed their culture on the rest of Europe. 
In the history of the Italian intellect painting takes 
the same rank as that of sculpture in the Greek. 
Before beginning, however, to trace the course of 
Itahan art, it will be necessary to discuss some pre- 
liminary questions, important for a right understand- 
ing of the relations assumed by painting to the 
thoughts of the Renaissance, and for explaining its 
superiority over the sister art of sculpture in that 
age. This I feel the more bound to do because it 
is my object in this volume to treat of art with 
special reference to the general culture of the 
nation. 

What, let us ask in the first place, was the task 
appointed for the fine arts on the threshold of the 
modern world ? They had, before all things, to 
give form to the ideas evolved by Christianity, and 
to embody a class of emotions unknown to the 
ancients.^ The inheritance of the Middle Ages 

' It may fairly be questioned whether that necessary connection 
between art and religion which is commonly taken for granted does 
in truth exist ; in other words, whether great art might not flourish 
without any religious content. This, however, is a speculative prob- 
lem, for the present and the future rather than the past. Historically, 
it has always been found that the arts in their origin are dependent on 
religion. Nor is the reason far to seek. Art aims at expressing an 
ideal ; and this ideal is the transfiguration of human elements into 
something nobler, felt and apprehended by the imagination. Such an 
ideal, such an all-embracing glorification of humanity only exists for 
simple and unsophisticated societies in the form of religion. Religion 
is the universal poetry which all possess ; and the artist, dealing with 
the mythology of his national belief, feels himself in vital sympathy 



CHRISTIAN AND PAGAN TRADITIONS. 7 

had to be appropriated and expressed. In the 
course of performing this work, the painters helped 
to humanize rehgion, and revealed the dignity and 
beauty of the body of man. Next, in the fifteenth 
century, the riches of classic culture were discovered 
and art was called upon to aid in the interpretation 
of the ancient to the modern mind. The problem 
was no longer simple. Christian and pagan tra- 
ditions came into close contact, and contended for 
the empire of the newly-liberated intellect. During 
this struggle the arts, true to their own principles, 
eliminated from both traditions the more strictly 
human elements, and expressed them in beautiful 
form to the imagination and the senses. The brush 
of the same painter depicted Bacchus wedding 
Ariadne and Mary fainting on the hill of Calvary. 
Careless of any peril to dogmatic orthodoxy, and 
undeterred by the dread of encouraging pagan sen^ 
suality, the artists wrought out their modern ideal 
of beauty in the double field of Christian and Hel- 
lenic legend. Before the force of painting was ex- 
hausted, it had thus traversed the whole cycle ot 

with the imagination of the men for whom he works. More than the 
painter is required for the creation of great painting, and more than 
the poet for the exhibition of immortal verse. Painters are but the 
hands, and poets but the voices, whereby peoples express their accu- 
mulated thoughts and permanent emotions. Behind them crowd the 
generations of the myth-makers ; and around them floats the vital 
atmosphere of enthusiasms on which their own souls and the souls 0} 
their brethren have been nourished, 



a RENAISSANCE IN ITALY, 

thoughts and feelings that form the content of the 
modern mind. Throughout this performance, art 
proved itself a powerful coagent in the emancipa- 
tion of the intellect ; the impartiality wherewith its 
methods were applied to subjects sacred and profane, 
the emphasis laid upon physical strength and beauty 
as good things and desirable, the subordination of 
classical and mediaeval myths to one aesthetic law 
of loveliness, all tended to withdraw attention from 
the differences between paganism and Christianity, 
and to fix it on the goodliness of that humanity 
wherein both find their harmony. 

This being in general the task assigned to art 
in the Renaissance, we may next inquire what 
constituted the specific quality of modem as dis- 
tinguished from antique feeling, and why painting 
could not fail to take the first place among modern 
arts. In other words, how was it that, while sculp- 
ture was the characteristic fine art of antiquity, 
painting became the distinguishing fine art of the 
modern era? No true form of figurative art in- 
tervened between Greek sculpture and Italian paint- 
ing. The latter took up the work of investing 
thought with sensible shape from the dead hands 
of the former. Nor had the tradition that con- 
nected art with religion been interrupted, although 
a new cycle of religious ideas had been substituted 
for the old ones. The late Roman and Byzantine 



MEDIjEVAL CHRISTIANITY. % 

manners, through which the vital energies of the 
Athenian genius dwindled into barren formalism, 
still lingered, giving crude and lifeless form to 
Christian conceptions. But the thinking and feel- 
ing subject, meanwhile, had undergone a change so 
all- important that it now imperatively required fresh 
channels for its self-expression. It was destined 
to find these, not as of old in sculpture, but in 
painting. 

During the interval between the closing of the 
ancient and the opening of the modem age, the faith 
of Christians had attached itself to symbols and ma- 
terial objects little better than fetiches. The host, 
the relic, the wonder-working shrine, things endowed 
with a mysterious potency, evoked the yearning and 
the awe of mediaeval multitudes. To such concrete 
actualities the worshipers referred their sense of 
the invisible divinity. The earth of Jerusalem, the 
Holy Sepulchre, the House of Loreto, the Sudarium 
of Saint Veronica, aroused their deepest sentiments 
of awful adoration. Like Thomas, they could not 
be contented with believing ; they must also touch 
and handle. At the same time, in apparent contra- 
distinction to this demand for things of sense as 
signs of supersensual power, the claims of dogma 
on the intellect grew more imperious, and mysti- 
cism opened for the dreaming soul a realm of spir- 
itual rapture. For the figurative arts there was 



10 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

no true place in either of these regions. Painting 
and sculpture were alike alien to the grosser super- 
stitions, the scholastic subtleties, and the ecstatic 
trances of the Middle Ages ; nor had they any thing 
in common with the logic of theology. Votaries 
who kissed a fragment of the cross with passion 
could have found but little to satisfy their ardor in 
pictures painted by a man of genius. A formless 
wooden idol, endowed with the virtue of curing 
disease, charmed the pilgrim more than a statue 
noticeable only for its beauty or its truth to life. 
We all know that Wunderthatige Bilder sind meist 
nur schlechte Gem'dlde. In architecture alone, the 
mysticism of the Middle Ages, their vague but po- 
tent feelings of infinity, their yearning toward a 
deity invisible, but localized in holy things and 
places, found artistic outlet. Therefore architecture 
was essentially a mediaeval art. The rise of sculp- 
ture and painting indicated the quickening to life 
of new faculties, fresh intellectual interests, and a 
novel way of apprehending the old substance of 
religious feeling; for comprehension of these arts 
implies delight in things of beauty for their own 
sake, a sympathetic attitude toward the world of 
sense, a new freedom of the mind produced by the 
regeneration of society through love. 

The mediaeval faiths were still vivid when the 
first Italian painters began their work, and the 



THE PROMISE OF THE ARTS. ii 

sincere endeavor of these men was to set forth 
in beautiful and worthy form the truths of Chris- 
tianity. The eyes of the worshiper should no 
longer have a mere stock or stone to contemplate : 
his imagination should be helped by the dogmatic 
presentation of the scenes of sacred history, and 
his devotion be quickened by lively images of the 
passion of our Lord. Spirit should converse with 
spirit, through no veil of symbol, but through the 
transparent medium of art, itself instinct with in- 
breathed life and radiant with ideal beauty. The 
body and the soul, moreover, should be reconciled ; 
and God's likeness should be once more acknowl- 
edged in the features and the limbs of man. Such 
was the promise of art ; and this promise was in a 
great measure fulfilled by the painting of the four- 
teenth century. Men ceased to worship their God 
in the holiness of ugliness ; and a great city called 
its street Glad on the birthday-festival of the first 
picture investing religious emotion with aesthetic 
charm. But in making good the promise they had 
given, it was needful for the arts on the one hand 
to enter a region not wholly their own — the region 
of abstractions and of mystical conceptions; and 
on the other to create a world of sensuous delight- 
fulness, wherein the spiritual element was mate- 
rialized to the injury of its own essential quality 
Spirit, indeed, spake to spirit, so far as the religious 



12 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

content was concerned ; but flesh spake also to flesh 
in the aesthetic form. The incarnation promised 
by the arts involved a corresponding sensuousness. 
Heaven was brought down to earth, but at the 
cost of making men believe that earth itself was 
heavenly. 

At this point the subject of our inquiry naturally 
divides into two main questions. The first concerns 
the form of figurative art specially adapted to the 
requirements of religious thought in the fourteenth 
century. The second treats of the effect resulting 
both to art and religion from the expression of 
mystical and theological conceptions in plastic form. 

When we consider the nature of the ideas assi- 
milated in the Middle Ages by the human mind, it 
is clear that art, in order to set them forth, demanded 
a language the Greeks had never greatly needed, 
and had therefore never fully learned. To over- 
estimate the difference from an aesthetic point of 
view between the religious notions of the Greeks 
and those which Christianity had made essential 
would be difficult. Faith, hope, and charity ; humility, 
endurance, suffering ; the Resurrection and the Judg- 
ment ; the Fall and the Redemption ; Heaven and 
Hell ; the height and depth of man's mixed nature ; 
the drama of human destiny before the throne of 
God : into the sphere of thoughts like these, vivid 
and solemn, transcending the region of sense and 



THE GREEK IDEAL. 15 

corporeity, carrying the mind away to an ideal world,' 
where the things of this earth obtained a new reality 
by virtue of their relation to an invisible and infinite 
Beyond, the modem arts in their infancy were thrust. 
There was nothing finite here or tangible, no glad- 
ness in the beauty of girlish foreheads or the swift- 
ness of a young man's limbs, no simple idealization 
of natural delightfulness. The human body, which 
the figurative arts must needs use as the vehicle of 
their expression, had ceased to have a value in and 
for itself, had ceased to be the true and adequate 
investiture of thoughts demanded from the artist. 
At best it could be taken only as the symbol of some 
inner meaning, the shrine of an indwelling spirit 
nobler than itself; just as a lamp of alabaster owes 
its beauty and its worth to the flame it more than 
half conceals, the light transmitted through its scarce 
transparent walls. 

In ancient art those moral and spiritual qualities 
which the Greeks recognized as truly human and 
therefore divine allowed themselves to be incar- 
nated in well-selected types of physical perfection. 
The deities of the Greek mythology were limited 
to the conditions of natural existence: they were 
men and women of a larger mold and freer person- 
ality; less complex, inasmuch as each completed 
some one attribute ; less thwarted in activity, inas- 
much as no limit was assigned to exercise of power 



RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

The passions and the faculties of man, analyzed by 
unconscious psychology, and deified by religious 
fancy, were invested by sculpture with appropriate 
forms, the tact of the artist selecting corporeal quali- 
ties fitted to impersonate the special character of 
each divinity. Nor was it possible that, the gods 
and goddesses being what they were, exact 
analogues should not be found for them in idealized 
humanity. In a Greek statue there was enough 
soul to characterize the beauty of the body to ren- 
der her due meed of wisdom to Pallas, to distinguish 
the swiftness of Hermes from the strength of Hera- 
cles, or to contrast the virginal grace of Artemis 
with the abundance of Aphrodite's charms. At the 
same time the spirituality that gave its character to 
each Greek deity was not such that) even in thought, 
it could be dissociated from corporeal form. The 
Greeks thought their gods as incarnate persons ; and 
all the artist had to see to was that this incarnate 
personality should be impressive in his marble. 

Christianity, on the other hand, made the moral 
and spiritual nature of man all-essential. It sprang 
from an earlier religion, that judged it impious to 
give any form to God. The body and its terrestrial 
activity occupied but a subordinate position in its 
system. It was the life of the soul, separable from 
this frame of flesh, and destined to endure when 
earth and all that it contains had ended — ^a life that 



THE CHRISTIAN IDEAL. 15 

was continued conflict and aspiring struggle — which 
the arts, insofar as they became its instrument, were 
called upon to illustrate. It was the worship of a 
Deity, all spirit, to be sought on no one sacred hill, 
to be adored in no transcendent shape, that they 
were bound to heighten. The most highly prized 
among the Christian virtues had no necessary con- 
nection with beauty of feature or strength of limb. 
Such beauty and such strength at any rate were 
accidental, not essential. A Greek faun could not 
but be graceful ; a Greek hero was of necessity 
vigorous. But St. Stephen might be steadfast to 
the death without physical charm ; St. Anthony might 
put to flight the devils of the flesh without muscular 
force. It is clear that the radiant physical perfection 
proper to the deities of Greek sculpture was not 
sufficient in this sphere. Again, the most stirring 
episodes of the Christian mythology involved pain 
and perturbation of the spirit ; the victories of the 
Christian athletes were won in conflicts carried on 
within their hearts and souls — * For we wrestle not 
against flesh and blood, but against principalities 
and powers,* demoniac leaders of spiritual legions. 
It is, therefore, no less clear that the tranquillity and 
serenity of the Hellenic ideal, so necessary to con- 
summate sculpture, was here out of place. How 
could the Last Judgment, that day of wrath, when 
every soul, however insignificant on earth, will play 



f6 RENAISSANCE IN ITAL Y. 

the first part for one moment in an awful tragedy, be 
properly expressed in plastic form, harmonious and 
pleasing? And supposing that the artist should 
abandon the attempt to exclude ugliness and discord, 
pain and confusion, from his representation of the 
Dies IrcB, how could he succeed in setting forth by 
the sole medium of the human body the anxiety and 
anguish of the soul at such a time ? The physical 
form, instead of being adequate to the ideas ex- 
pressed, and therefore helpful to the artist, is a posi- 
tive embarrassment, a source of weakness. The 
most powerful pictorial or sculpturesque delineation 
of the Judgment, when compared with the pangs 
inflicted on the spirit by a guilty conscience, pangs 
whereof words may render some account, but which 
can find no analogue in writhings of the limbs or 
face, must of necessity be found a failure. Still 
more impossible, if we pursue this train of thought 
into another region, is it for the figurative arts to 
approach the Christian conception of God in His 
omnipotence and unity. Christ Himself, the central 
figure of the Christian universe, the desired of all 
nations, in whom the Deity assumed a human form 
and dwelt with men, is no fit subject for such art at 
any rate as the Greeks had perfected. The fact of 
His incarnation brought Him indeed within the 
proper sphere of the fine arts ; but the chief events 
of His life on earth removed Him beyond the reach 



THE CRUCIFIXION. 17 

of sculpture. This is an important consideration. 
It is to this that our whole argument is tending. 
Therefore to enlarge upon this point will not be 
useless, 

Christ is specially adored in His last act of love 
on Calvary ; and how impossible it is to set that 
forth consistently with the requirements of strictly 
plastic art may be gathered by comparing the pas- 
sion of St Bernard's Hymn to our Lord upon the 
Cross with all that Winckelmann and Hegel have 
so truly said about the restrained expression, digni- 
fied generality, and harmonious beauty essential to 
sculpture. It is the negation of tranquillity, the 
excess of feeling, the absence of comeliness, the 
contrast between visible weakness and invisible om- 
nipotence, the physical humiliation voluntarily suf- 
fered by Him that ' ruled over all the angels, that 
walked on the pavements of heaven, whose feet 
were clothed with stars* — it is all this that gives 
their force and pathos to these stanzas ' 

Omnis vigor atque viror 
Hinc recessit ; non admiror 
Mors apparet in inspectu, 
Totus pendens in defectu, 

Attritus aegra macie.* 



• All Thy strength and bloom are faded*. 
Who hath thus Thy state degraded ? 
Death upon Thy form is written ; 
See the wan worn limbs, the smitten 
Breast upon the cruel tree ! 



i8 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

Sic affectus, sic despectus, 
Propter me sic interfectus, 
Peccatori tarn indigno 
Cum amoris in te signo 

Appare clara facie. 

We have never heard that Pheidias or Praxiteles 
chose Prometheus upon Caucasus for the supreme 
display of his artistic skill ; and even the anguish 
expressed in the group of the Laocoon is justly 
thought to violate the laws of antique sculpture. Yet 
here was a greater than Prometheus — one who had 
suffered more, and on whose suffering the salvation 
of the human race depended, to exclude whom from 
the sphere of representation in art was the same as 
confessing the utter impotence of art to grasp the 
vital thought of modern faith. It is clear that the 
muses of the new age had to haunt Calvary instead 
of Helicon, slaking their thirst at no Castalian spring, 
but at the fount of tears outpoured by all creation for 
a stricken God. What Hellas had achieved supplied 
no norm or method for the arts in this new service. 

From what has hitherto been advanced, we may 
assert with confidence that, if the arts were to play 
an important part in Christian culture, an art was 
imperatively demanded that should be at home in 
the sphere of intense feeling, that should treat the 

* Thus despised and desecrated, 
Thus in dying desolated, 
Slain for me, of sinners vilest, 
Loving Lord, on me Thou smilest ; 

Shine, bright face, and strengthen me ! 



SCULPTURE FOR THE GREEKS. 19 

body as the interpreter and symbol of the soul, and 
should not shrink from pain and passion. How far 
the fine arts were at all qualified to express the 
essential thoughts of Christianity — a doubt suggested 
in the foregoing paragraphs — and how far, through 
their proved inadequacy to perform this task com- 
pletely, they weakened the hold of mediaeval faiths 
upon the modern mind, are questions to be raised 
hereafter. For the present it is enough to affirm 
that least of all the arts could sculpture, with its 
essential repose and its dependence on corporal con- 
ditions, solve the problem. Sculpture had suited 
the requirements of Greek thought. It belonged 
by right to men who not unwillingly accepted the 
life of this world as final, and who worshiped in 
their deities the incarnate personality of man made 
perfect. But it could not express the cycle of 
Christian ideas. The desire of a better world, the 
fear of a worse ; the sense of sin referred to physical 
appetites, and the corresponding mortification of the 
flesh ; hope, ecstasy, and penitence and prayer — im- 
ply contempt or hatred for the body, suggest notions 
too spiritual to be conveyed by the rounded con- 
tours of beautiful limbs, too full of struggle for statu- 
esque tranquillity. The new element needed a 
more elastic medium of expression. Motives more 
varied, gradations of sentiment more delicate, the 
fugitive and transient phases of emotion, the inner 



20 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

depths of consciousness, had somehow to be seized. 
It was here that painting asserted its supremacy. 
Painting is many degrees further removed than 
sculpture from dependence on the body in the full- 
ness of its physical proportions. It touches our sen- 
sibilities by suggestions more indirect, more mobile, 
and more multiform. Color and shadow, aerial 
perspective and complicated grouping, denied to 
sculpture, but within the proper realm of painting, 
have their own significance, their real relation to 
feelings vaguer, but not less potent, than those 
which find expression in the simple human form. 
To painting, again, belongs the play of feature, indi- 
cative of internal movement, through a whole gamut 
of modulations inapprehensible by sculpture. All 
that drapery by its partial concealment of the form 
it clothes, and landscape by its sympathies with 
human sentiment, may supply to enhance the passion 
of the spectator pertains to painting. This art, 
therefore, owing to the greater variety of means at 
its disposal, and its greater adequacy to express 
emotion, became the paramount Italian art 

To sculpture in the Renaissance, shorn of the 
divine right to create gods and heroes, was left the 
narrower field of decoration, portraiture, and sepul- 
chral monuments. In the last of these departments 
it found the noblest scope for its activity ; for be- 
yond the grave, according to Christian belief, the 



PAINTING FOR THE MODERN WORLD. 21 

account of the striving, hoping, and resisting soul is 
settled. The corpse upon the bier may bear the 
stamp of spiritual character impressed on it in life ; 
but the spirit, with its struggle and its passion, has 
escaped as from a prison-house, and flown else- 
whither. The body of the dead man, for whom this 
world is over, and who sleeps in peace, awaiting 
resurrection, and thereby not wholly dead, around 
whose tomb watch sympathizing angels or contem- 
plative genii, was, therefore, the proper subject for the 
highest Christian sculpture. Here, if anywhere, the 
right emotion could be adequately expressed in stone, 
and the molded form be made the symbol of repose, 
expectant of restored activity. The greatest sculptor 
of the modern age was essentially a poet of Death. 

Painting, then, for the reasons already assigned 
and insisted on, was the art demanded by the modern 
intellect upon its emergence from the stillness of the 
Middle Ages. The problem, however, even for the 
art of painting was not simple. The painters, follow- 
ing the masters of mosaic, began by setting forth the 
history, mythology, and legends of the Christian 
Church in imagery freer and more beautiful than 
lay within the scope of treatment by Romanesque or 
Byzantine art. So far their task was comparatively 
easy ; for the idyllic grace of maternal love in the 
Madonna, the pathetic incidents of martyrdom, the 
courage of confessors, the ecstasies of celestial joy 



23 RENAISSANCE IN ITAL V. 

in redeemed souls, the loveliness of a pure life in 
modest virgins, and the dramatic episodes of sacred 
story, furnish a multitude of motives admirably 
pictorial. There was, therefore, no great obstacle 
upon the threshold, so long as artists gave their 
willing service to the Church. Yet, looking back 
upon this phase of painting, we are able to perceive 
that already the adaptation of art to Christian dogma 
entailed concessions on both sides. Much, on the 
one hand, had to be omitted from the programme 
offered to artistic treatment, for the reason that the 
fine arts could not deal with it at all. Much, on the 
other hand, had to be expressed by means which 
painting in a state of perfect freedom would repu- 
diate. Allegorical symbols, like Prudence with two 
faces, and pamlul episodes of agony and anguish 
marred her work of beauty. There was consequently 
a double compromise, involving a double sacrifice of 
something precious. The faith suffered by having 
its mysteries brought into the light of day, incar- 
nated in form, and humanized. Art suffered by 
being forced to render intellectual abstractions to the 
eye through figured symbols. 

As technical skill increased, and as beauty, the 
proper end of art, became more rightly understood 
the painters found that their craft was worthy of being 
made an end in itself, and that the actualities of life 
observed around them had claims upon their genius 



BEAUTY AN END IN ITSELF. 23 

no less weighty than dogmatic mysteries. The sub- 
jects they had striven at first to realize with all sim- 
plicity now became the vehicles for the display of 
sensuous beauty, science, and mundane pageantry. 
The human body received separate and independent 
study, as a thkig in itself incomparably beautiful, 
commanding more powerful emotions by its magic 
than aught else that sways the soul. At the same 
time the external world, with all its wealth of animal 
and vegetable life, together with the works of human 
ingenuity in costly clothing and superb buildings, 
was seen to be in every detail worthy of most pa- 
tient imitation. Anatomy and perspective taxed the 
understanding of the artist, whose whole force was 
no longer devoted to the task of bringing religious 
ideas within the limits of the representable. Next, 
when the classical revival came into play, the 
arts, in obedience to the spirit of the age, left the 
sphere of sacred subjects, and employed their full- 
grown faculties in the domain of myths and pagan 
fancies. In this way painting may truly be said to 
have opened the new era of culture, and to have first 
manifested the freedom of the modern mind. When 
Luca Signorelli drew naked young men for a back- 
ground to his picture of Madonna and the infant 
Christ, he created for the student a symbol of the 
attitude assumed by fine art in its liberty of outlook 
over the whole range of human interests. Standing 



£4 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY, 

before this picture in the Uffizzi, we feel that the 
Church, while hoping to adorn her cherished dogmas 
with aesthetic beauty, had encouraged a power an- 
tagonistic to her own, a power that liberated the 
spirit she sought to inthrall, restoring to mankind 
the earthly paradise from which monasticism had 
expelled it 

Not to diverge at this point, and to entertain the 
difficult problem of the relation of the fine arts to 
Christianity, would be to shrink from the most thorny 
question offered to the understanding by the history 
of the Renaissance. On the very threshold of the 
matter I am bound to affirm my conviction that the 
spiritual purists of all ages — the Jews, the iconoclasts 
of Byzantium, Savonarola, and our Puritan ances- 
tors — were justified in their mistrust of plastic art 
The spirit of Christianity and the spirit of figurative 
art are opposed, not because such art is immoral, 
but because it can not free itself from sensuous asso- 
ciations.^ It is always bringing us back to the dear 
life of earth, from which the faith would sever us. 
It is always reminding us of the body which piety 

* I am aware that many of my readers will demur that I am con- 
founding Christianity with ascetic or monastic Christianity ; yet I can 
not read the New Testament, the ' Imitatio Christi,' the * Confessions ' 
of S. Augustine, and the * Pilgrim's Progress ' without feeling that Chris- 
tianity in its origin, and as understood by its chief champions, was and 
is ascetic. Of this Christianity I therefore speak, not of the philoso- 
phized Christianity, which is reasonably regarded with suspicion by 
the orthodox and the uncompromising. It was, moreover, with Chris- 
tianity of this primitive type that the arts came first into collision. 



ANTAGONISM OF ART AND PURE PIETY, 25 

bidb US to forget. Painters and sculptors glorify 
that which saints and ascetics have mortified. The 
masterpieces of Titian and Correggio, for example, 
lead the soul away from compunction, away from 
penitence, away from worship even, to dwell on the 
delight of youthful faces, blooming color, graceful 
movement, delicate emotion.^ Nor is this all : relig- 
ious motives may be misused for what is worse than 
merely sensuous suggestiveness. The masterpieces 
of the Bolognese and Neapolitan painters, while they 
pretend to quicken compassion for martyrs in their 
agony, pander to a bestial blood-lust lurking in the 
darkest chambers of the soul.^ Therefore it is that 
piety, whether the piety of monastic Italy or of 
Puritan England, turns from these aesthetic triumphs 
as from something alien to itself When the wor- 
shiper would fain ascend on wings of ecstasy to 
God, the infinite, ineffable, unrealized, how can he 
endure the contact of those splendid forms, in which 
the lust of the eye and the pride of life, professing to 
subserve devotion, remind him rudely of the good- 
liness of sensual existence? Art, by magnifying 
human beauty, contradicts these Pauline maxims: 
* For me to live is Christ, and to die is gain ;' ' Set 
your affections on things above, not on things on 
earth ;' ' Your life is hid with Christ in God.' The 

* Titian's ' Assumption of the Virgin ' at Venice, Correggio's • Cor- 
onation of the Virgin ' at Parma. 

' Domenichino, Guido, Ribera, Salvator Rosa. 



26 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

sublimity and elevation it gives to carnal loveliness 
are themselves hostile to the spirit that holds no 
truce or compromise of traffic with the flesh. As 
displayed in its most perfect phases, in Greek sculp- 
ture and Venetian painting, art dignifies the actual 
mundane life of man ; but Christ, in the language of 
uncompromising piety, means every thing most alien 
to this mundane life — self-denial, abstinence from 
fleshly pleasure, the waiting for true bliss beyond 
the grave, seclusion even from social and domestic 
ties. ' He that loveth father and mother more than 
me is not worthy of me/ ' He that taketh not his 
cross and followeth me is not worthy of me.* It is 
needful to insist upon these extremest sentences of 
the New Testament, because upon them was based 
the religious practice of the Middle Ages, more sin- 
cere in their determination to fulfill the letter and 
embrace the spirit of the Gospel than any succeeding 
age has been.^ 

f If, then, there really exists this antagonism be- 
tween fine art glorifying human life and piety con- 
temning it, how came it, we may ask, that even in 
the Middle Ages the Church hailed art as her co- 
adjutor ? The answer lies in this, that the Church 
has always compromised. When the conflict of the 
first few centuries of Christianity had ended in her 

* Not to quote again the ' Imitatio Christi,' it is enough to allude to 
S. Francis as shown in the ' Fioretti.' 



THE COMPROMISES OF THE CHURCH. 27 

triumph, she began to mediate between asceticism 
and the world. Intent on absorbing all existent ele- 
ments of life and power, she conformed her system 
to the Roman type, established her service in ba- 
silicas and pagan temples, adopted portions of the 
antique ritual, and converted local genii into saints. 
At the same time she utilized the spiritual forces of 
monasticism, and turned the mystic impulse of ecstat- 
ics to account. The Orders of the Preachers and 
the Begging Friars became her militia and police; 
the mystery of Christ's presence in the Eucharist 
was made an engine of the priesthood ; the dreams 
of Paradise and Purgatory gave value to her par- 
dons, interdictions, jubilees, indulgences, and curses. 
In the Church the spirit of the cloister and the spirit 
of the world found neutral ground, and to the prac- 
tical accommodation between these hostile elements 
she owed her wide supremacy. The Christianity 
she formed and propagated was different from that 
of the New Testament, inasmuch as it had taken up 
into itself a mass of mythological anthropomorphic 
elements. Thus transmuted and materialized, thus 
accepted by the vivid faith of an unquestioning 
populace, Christianity offered a proper medium for 
artistic activity. The whole first period of Italian 
painting was occupied with the endeavor to set 
forth in form and color the popular conceptions of 
a faith at once unphilosophical and unspiritual, beau- 



28 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY 

tiful and fit for art by reason of the human elements 
it had assumed into its substance. It was natural, 
therefore, that the Church should show herself in- 
dulgent to the arts, which were effecting in their own 
sphere what she had previously accomplished, though 
purists and ascetics, holding fast by the original 
spirit of their creed, might remain irreconcilably 
antagonistic to their influence. The Reformation, 
on the contrary, rejecting the whole mass of com- 
promises sanctioned by the Church, and returning to 
the elemental principles of the faith, was no less 
naturally opposed to fine arts, which, after giving 
sensuous form to Catholic mythology, had recently 
attained to liberty and brought again the gods of 
Greece. 

A single illustration might be selected from the 
annals of Italian painting to prove how difficult even 
the holiest-minded and most earnest painter found it 
to effect the proper junction between plastic beauty 
and pious feeling. Fra Bartolommeo, the disciple of 
Savonarola, painted a Sebastian in the cloister of 
S. Marco, where it remained until the Dominican 
confessors became aware, through the avowals of 
female penitents, that this picture was a stumbling- 
block and snare to soulsc It was then removed, and 
what became of it we do not know for certain. Fra 
Bartolommeo undoubtedly intended this ideal por- 
trait of the martyr to be edifying. S. Sebastian 



ART AND RELIGION, 29 

was to stand before the world as the young man, 
strong and beautiful, who endured to the end and 
won the crown of martyrdom. No other ideas but 
those of heroism, constancy, or faith were meant to 
be expressed ; but the painter's art demanded that 
their expression should be eminently beautiful, and 
the beautiful body of the young man distracted 
attention from his spiritual virtues to his physical 
perfections. A similar maladjustment of the means 
of plastic art to the purposes of religion would have 
been impossible in Hellas, where the temples of 
Eros and of Phoebus stood side by side; but in 
Christian Florence the craftsman's skill sowed seeds 
of discord in the souls of the devout.^ 

This story is but a coarse instance of the separa- 
tion between piety and plastic art. In truth, the 
difficulty of uniting them in such a way that the latter 
shall enforce the former lies far deeper than its 
powers of illustration reach. Religion has its proper 
end in contemplation and in conduct. Art aims at 
presenting sensuous embodiment of thoughts and feel- 
ings with a view to intellectual enjoyment. Now, 
many thoughts are incapable of sensuous embodi- 

* The difficulty of combining the true spirit of piety with the 
ideal of natural beauty in art was strongly felt by Savonarola. Rio 
(' L'Art Chretien, vol. ii. pp. 422-426) has written eloquently on this 
subject, but without making it plain how Savonarola's condemnation 
of life studies from the nude could possibly have been other than 
an obstacle to the liberal and scientific prosecution of the art of 
painting. 



30 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

ment ; they appear as abstractions to the philoso^ 
phical intellect or as dogmas to the theological 
understanding. To effect an alliance between art 
and philosophy or art and theology in the specific 
region of either religion or speculation is, therefore, 
an impossibility. In like manner there are many 
feelings which can not properly assume a sensuous 
form ; and these are precisely religious feelings, in 
which the soul abandons sense, and leaves the actual 
world behind, to seek her freedom in a spiritual 
region.^ Yet, while we recognize the truth of this 
reasoning, it would be unscientific to maintain that, 
until they are brought into close and inconvenient 
contact, there is direct hostility between religion and 
the arts. The sphere of the two is separate ; their 
aims are distinct ; they must be allowed to perfect 
themselves, each after its own fashion. In the large 
philosophy of human nature, represented by Goethe's 
famous motto, there is room for both, because those 
who embrace it bend their natures neither wholly to 
the pietism of the cloister nor to the sensuality of art. 
They find the meeting-point of art and of religion 
in their own humanity, and perceive that the antag- 
onism of the two begins when art is set to do work 

* See Rio, ' L'Art chretien,' vol. ii. chap. xi. pp. 319-327, for an 
ingenious defense of mystic art. The tales he tells of Bernardino da 
Siena and the blessed Umiliana will not win the sympathy of Teu- 
tonic Christians, who must believe that semi-sensuous, semi-pious rap- 
tures, like those described by S. Catherine of Siena and S. Theresa, 
have something in them psychologically morbid. 



RECAPITULATION. 31 

alien to its nature, and to minister to what it does not 
naturally serve. 

At the risk of repetition I must now resume the 
points I have attempted to establish in this chapter. 
As in ancient Greece, so also in Renaissance Italy, 
the fine arts assumed the first place in the intel- 
lectual culture of the nation. But the thought 
and feeling of the modern world required an aes- 
thetic medium more capable of expressing emotion 
in its intensity, variety, and subtlety than sculpture. 
Therefore painting was the art par excellence of 
Italy. Yet even painting, notwithstanding the range 
and wealth of its resources, could not deal with the 
motives of Christianity so successfully as sculpture 
with the myths of paganism. The religion it inter- 
preted transcended the actual conditions of humanity, 
while art is bound down by its nature to the limita- 
tions of the world we live in. The Church imagined 
art would help her ; and within a certain sphere of 
subjects, by vividly depicting Scripture histories and 
the lives of saints, by creating new types of serene 
beauty and pure joy, by giving form to angelic 
beings, by interpreting Mariolatry in all its charm 
and pathos, and by rousing deep sympathy with our 
Lord in His Passion, painting lent efficient aid to 
piety. Yet painting had to omit the very pith and 
kernel of Christianity as conceived by devout, un- 
compromising purists. Nor did it do what the 



32 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

Church would have desired. Instead of riveting 
the fetters of ecclesiastical authority, instead of en- 
forcing mysticism and asceticism, it really restored to 
humanity the sense of its own dignity and beauty, 
and helped to prove the untenabiHty of the mediaeval 
stand-point ; for art is essentially and uncontrollably 
free, and, what is more, is free precisely in that realm 
of sensuous delightfulness from which cloistral re- 
ligion turns aside to seek her own ecstatic liberty of 
contemplation. 

The first step in the emancipation of the modern 
mind was taken thus by art, proclaiming to men 
the glad tidings of their goodliness and greatness 
in a world of manifold enjoyment created for their 
use. Whatever painting touched became by that 
touch human ; piety, at the lure of art, folded her 
soaring wings and rested on the genial earth. This 
the Church had not foreseen. Because the freedom of 
the human spirit expressed itself in painting only under 
visible images, and not, like heresy, in abstract sen- 
tences ; because this art sufficed for Mariolatry and 
confirmed the cult of local saints ; because its sensu- 
ousness was not at variance with a creed that had 
been deeply sensualized — the painters were allowed 
to run their course unchecked. Then came a second 
stage in their development of art. By placing the 
end of their endeavor in technical excellence and 
anatomical accuracy, they began to make representa- 



REVIVED T-AGANISM. 33 

tion an object in itself, independently of its spiritual 
significance. Next, under the influence of the clas- 
sical revival, they brought home again the old 
powers of the earth — Aphrodite and Galatea and 
the Loves, Adonis and Narcissus and the Graces, 
Phoebus and Daphne and Aurora, Pan and the Fauns, 
and the Nymphs of the woods and the waves. 

When these dead deities rose from their sep- 
ulchres to sway the hearts of men in the new age, it 
was found that something had been taken from their 
ancient bloom of innocence, something had been 
added of emotional intensity. Italian art recognized 
their claim to stand beside Madonna and the saints 
in the Pantheon of humane culture ; but the painters 
remade them in accordance with the modem spirit 
This slight touch of transformation proved that 
they preserved a vital meaning for an altered age. 
Having personified for the antique world qualities 
which, though suppressed and ignored by militant 
and mediaeval Christianity, were strictly human, the 
Hellenic deities still signified those qualities for 
modern Europe, now at length re-fortified by contact 
with the ancient mind. For the Renaissance was a 
return in all sincerity and faith to the gloiy and glad- 
ness of nature, whether in the world without or in 
the soul of man. To apprehend that glory and that 
gladness with the pure and primitive perceptions of 
the early mythopoets was not given to the men oi 



34 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

the new world. Yet they did what in them lay, 
with senses sophisticated by many centuries of sub- 
tlest warping, to replace the first free joy of kinship 
with primeval things. For the painters, far more 
than for the poets of the sixteenth century, it was 
possible to reproduce a thousand forms of beauty, 
each attesting to the delightfulness of physical exist- 
ence, to the inalienable rights of natural desire, and 
to the participation of mankind in pleasures held in 
common by us with the powers of earth and sea 
and air. 

It is wonderful to watch the blending of elder 
and of younger forces in this process. The old gods 
lent a portion of their charm even to Christian my- 
thology, and showered their beauty-bloom on saints 
who died renouncing them. Sodoma's Sebastian is 
but Hyacinth or Hylas transpierced with arrows, 
so that pain and martyrdom add pathos to his poetry 
of youthfulness. Lionardo's S. John is a Faun of 
the forest, ivy-crowned and laughing, on whose lips 
the word * Repent ' would be a gleeful paradox. For 
the painters of the full Renaissance, Roman martyrs 
and Olympian deities — the heroes of the Acta Sanc- 
torum, and the heroes of Greek romance — were alike 
burghers of one spiritual city, the city of the beau- 
tiful and human. What exquisite and evanescent 
fragrance was educed from these apparently diverse 
blossoms by their interminglement and fusion — how 



FUSION OF CHRISTIAN AND PAGAN MOTIVES. 35 

the high-wrought sensibilities of the Christian were 
added to the clear and radiant fancies of the Greek, 
and how the frank sensuousness of the pagan gave 
body and fullness to the floating wraiths of an ascetic 
faith — remains a miracle for those who, like our 
master Lionardo, love to scrutinize the secrets of 
twin natures and of double graces. There are not 
a few for whom the mystery is repellent, who shrink 
from it as from Hermaphroditus. These will always 
find .something to pain them in the art of the 
Renaissance. 

Having co-ordinated the Christian and pagan 
traditions in its work of beauty, painting could ad- 
vance no farther. The stock of its sustaining mo- 
tives was exhausted. A problem that preoccupied 
the minds of thinking men at this epoch was, how to 
harmonize the two chief moments of human culture, 
the classical and the ecclesiastical. Without being 
as conscious of their hostility as we are, men felt 
that the pagan ideal was opposed to the Christian, 
and at the same time that a reconciliation had to 
be effected. Each had been worked out separately ; 
but both were needed for the modern synthesis. All 
that aesthetic handling, in this region more immedi- 
ately fruitful than pure thought, could do towards 
mingling them was done by the impartiality of the 
fine arts. Painting, in the work of Raphael, accom- 
plished a more vital harmony than philosophy in the 



36 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

writings of Pico and Ficino. A new Catholicity, a 
cosmopolitan orthodoxy of the beautiful, was mani- 
fested in his pictures. It lay outside his power, or 
that of any other artist, to do more than to extract 
from both revelations the elements of beauty they 
contained, and to show how freely he could use 
them for a common purpose. Nothing but the 
scientific method can in the long-run enable us to 
reach that further point, outside both Christianity 
and paganism, at which the classical ideal of a tem- 
perate and joyous natural life shall be restored to 
the conscience educated by the Gospel. This, per- 
chance, is the religion, still unborn or undeveloped, 
whereof Joachim of Flora dimly prophesied when 
he said that the kingdom of the Father was past, 
the kingdom of the Son was passing, and the king- 
dom of the Spirit was to be. The essence of it is 
contained in the whole growth to us ward of the 
human mind ; and though a creed so highly intel- 
lectualized as that will be can never receive ade- 
quate expression from the figurative arts, still the 
painting of the sixteenth century forms for it, as it 
were, a not unworthy vestibule. It does so, because 
it first succeeded in humanizing the religion of the 
Middle Ages, in proclaiming the true value of antique 
paganism for the modern mind, and in making both 
subserve the purposes of free and unimpeded art. 
Meanwhile, at the moment when painting was 



MUSIC. 37 

about to be exhausted, a new art had arisen, for 
which it remained, within the aesthetic sphere, to 
achieve much that painting could not do. When the 
cycle of Christian ideas had been accomplished by 
the painters, and when the first passion for antiquity 
had been satisfied, it was given at last to Music to 
express the soul in all its manifold feeling and 
complexity of movement. In music we see the 
point of departure where art leaves the domain of 
myths, Christian as well as pagan, and occupies itself 
with the emotional activity of man alone, and for 
its own sake. Melody and harmony, disconnected 
from words, are capable of receiving most varied 
interpretations, so that the same combinations of 
sound express the ecstasies of earthly and of heavenly 
love, conveying to the mind of the hearer only that 
element of pure passion which is the primitive and 
natural ground-material of either. They give dis- 
tinct form to moods of feeling as yet undetermined ; 
or, as the Italians put it, la mustca e il lafnento deW 
amove o la preghiera agli del. This, combined with 
its independence of all corporeal conditions, rendeis 
music the true exponent of the spirit in its freedom, 
and therefore the essentially modern art. 

For Painting, after the great work accomplished 
during the Renaissance,when the painters ran through 
the whole domain of thought within the scope of 
that age, there only remained portraiture, history, 



38 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

dramatic incident, landscape, genre, stilP liie, and 
animals. In these spheres the art is still exercised, 
and much good work, undoubtedly, is annually pro-^ 
duced by European painter:: But painting has lost 
its hold upon the center of our intellectual activity. 
It can no longer give form to the ideas that rule 
the modern world. These ideas are too abstract, 
too much a matter of the understanding, to be suc- 
cessfully handled by the figurative arts ; and it can 
not be too often or too emphatically stated that 
these arts produce nothing really great and uni- 
versal in relation to the spirit of their century, ex- 
cept by a process analogous to the mythopoetic 
With conceptions incapable of being sensuously ap- 
prehended, with ideas that lose their value when 
they are incarnated, they have no power to deal. 
As meteors become luminous by traversing the 
grosser element of our terrestrial atmosphere, so the 
thoughts that art employs must needs immerse 
themselves in sensuousness. They must be of a 
nature to gain rather than to suffer by such immer- 
sion ; and they must make a direct appeal to minds 
habitually apt to think in metaphors and myths. 
Of this sort are all religious ideas at a certain stage 
of their development, and this attitude at certain 
moments of history is adopted by the popular con- 
sciousness. We have so far outgrown it, have so 
complete^v exchanged mythology for curiosity, and 



ART AND THE MODERN SPIRIT. 39 

metaphor for science, that the necessary conditions 
for great art are wanting. Our deepest thoughts 
about the world and God are incapable of personi- 
fication by any aesthetic process ; they never enter 
that atmosphere wherein alone they could become 
through fine art luminous. For the painter, who 
is the form-giver, they have ceased to be shining 
stars, and are seen as opaque stones ; and though 
divinity be in them, it is a deity that refuses the 
investiture of form. 



CHAPTER II. 

ARCHITECTURE. 

Architecture of Mediaeval Italy — Milan, Genoa, Venice — The Despots 
as Builders — Diversity of styles — Local influences — Lombard, Tus- 
can Romanesque, Gothic — Italian want of feeling for Gothic — Ca^ 
thedrals of Siena and Orvieto — Secular Buildings of the Middle 
Ages — Florence and Venice — Private Palaces — Public Halls — Pa- 
lazzo della Signoria at Florence— Arnolfo del Cambio — S. Maria del 
Fiore — Brunelleschi's Dome — Classical revival in Architecture — Ro- 
man ruins — Three periods in Renaissance Architecture — Their cha- 
racteristics — Brunelleschi — Alberti — Palace-building — Michellozzo 
— Decorative work of the Revival — Bramante — Vitoni's Church 
of the Umilta at Pistoja — Palazzo del Te- Villa Farnesina — San- 
sovino at Venice — Michael Angelo — The building of S. Peter's — 
— Palladio — The Palazzo della Ragione at Vicenza — Lombard Ar- 
chitects — Theorists and students of Vitruvius — Vignola and Sca- 
mozzi — European influence of the Palladian style — Comparison of 
Scholars and Architects in relation to the Revival of Learning. 

Architecture is always the first of the fine arts 
to emerge from barbarism in the service of rehgion 
and of civic life. A house, as Hegel says, must be 
built for the god, before the image of the god, carved 
in stone or figured in mosaic, can be placed there. 
Council chambers must be prepared for the senate 
of a State before the national achievements can be 
painted on the walls. Thus Italy, before the age 
of the Renaissance proper, found herself provided 
with churches and palaces, which were destined in 



THE AGE OF THE COMMUNES. 41 

the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to be adorned 
with frescoes and statues. 

It was in the middle of the thirteenth century, 
during the long struggle for independence carried 
on by the republics of Lombardy and Tuscany 
against the Empire and the nobles, that some of 
the most durable and splendid public works were 
executed. The domes and towers of Florence and 
of Pisa were rising above the city walls, while the 
burghers who subscribed for their erection were 
staining the waves of Meloria and the canebrakes of 
the Arbia with their blood. Lombardy, at the end 
of her duel with Frederick Barbarossa, completed 
a vast undertaking, by which the fields of Milan 
are still rendered more productive than any other 
pasture-land in Europe. The Naviglio Grande, 
bringing the waters of the Ticino through a plain 
of thirty miles to Milan, was begun in 11 79, and 
was finished in 1258. The torrents of S. Gothard 
and the Simplon, which, after filling the Lago 
Maggiore, seemed destined to run wasteful through 
a wilderness of pebbles to the sea, were thus turned 
to account ; and to this great engineering work, as 
bold as it was simple, Milan owed the wealth that 
placed her princes on a level with the sovereigns 
of Europe. At the same period she built her 
walls, and closed their circuit with the sixteen gates 
that showed she loved magnificence combined with 



42 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

Strength. Genoa, between 1276 and 1283, pro- 
tected her harbors by a gigantic mole, and in 
1 295 brought the streams of the Ligurian Alps into 
the city by an aqueduct worthy of old Rome. 
Venice had to win her very footing from the sea 
and sand. So firmly did she drive her piles, so 
vigilantly watch their preservation, that palaces and 
cathedrals of marble might be safely reared upon 
the bosom of the deep. Meanwhile, stone bridges 
began to span the rivers of Italy ; the streets and 
squares of towns were everywhere paved Vv^ith flags. 
Before the first years of the fourteenth century 
the Italian cities presented a spectacle of solid and 
substantial comfort very startling to northerners who 
traveled from the unpaved lanes of London and 
the muddy labyrinths of Paris. 

Sismondi remarks with just pride that these 
great works were Republican. They were set on 
foot for the public use, and were constructed at 
the expense of the commonwealths. It is, how- 
ever, right to add that what the communes had 
begun the princes continued. To the splendid 
taste of the Visconti dynasty, for instance, Milan 
owed her wonderful Duomo and the octagon bell- 
tower of S. Gottardo. The Certosas of Pavia 
and Chiaravalle, the palace of Pavia, and a host 
of minor monuments remain in Milan and its neigh- 
borhood to prove how much a single family per* 



DIVERS TYPES IN ITALY. 43 

formed for the adornment of the cities they had 
subjugated. And what is true of Milan applies 
to Italy throughout its length and breadth. The 
despots held their power at the price of magnifi- 
cence in schemes of public utility. So much at least 
of the free spirit of the communes survived in them, 
that they were always rivaling each other in great 
works of architecture. Italian tyranny implied aes- 
thetic taste and liberality of expenditure. 

In no way is the characteristic diversity of the 
Italian communities so noticeable as in their build- 
ings. Each district, each town, has a well-defined 
peculiarity, reflecting the specific quahties of the 
inhabitants and the conditions under which they 
grew in culture. In some cases we may refer this 
local character to nationality and geographical posi- 
tion. Thus the name of the Lombards has been 
given to a style of Romanesque, which prevailed 
through Northern and Central Italy during the pe- 
riod of Lombard ascendency.^ The Tuscans never 

^ The question of the genesis of the Lombard style is one of the 
most difficult in Italian art-history. I would not willingly be under- 
stood to speak of Lombard architecture in any sense different from 
that in which it is usual to speak of Norman. To suppose that either 
the Lombards or the Normans had a style of their own, prior to their 
occupation of districts from the monuments of which they learned 
rudely to use the decayed Roman manner, would be incorrect. Yet 
it seems impossible to deny that both Normans and Lombards in 
adapting antecedent models added something of their own, specific to 
themselves as Northerners. The Lombard, like the Norman or 
the Rhenish Romanesque, is the first stage in the progressive mediaeval 
^chitecture of its own district, 



44 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

forgot the domes of their remote ancestors ; the 
Romans adhered closely to Latin traditions; the 
Southerners were affected by Byzantine and Sara- 
cenic models. In many instances the geology of 
the neighborhood determined the picturesque fea- 
tures of its architecture. The clay-fields of the 
valley of the Po produced the brick-work of Cre- 
mona, Pavia, Crema, Chiaravalle, and Vercelli. To 
their quarries of mandorlato the Veronese builders 
owed the peach-bloom colors of their columned 
aisles. Carrara provided the Pisans with mellow 
marble for their Baptistery and Cathedral ; Monte 
Ferrato supplied Pistoja and Prato with green ser- 
pentine ; while the pietra serena of the Apennines 
added austerity to the interior of Florentine build- 
ings. Again, in other instances, we detect the in- 
^uence of commerce or of conquest. The inter- 
course of Venice with Alexandria determined the 
unique architecture of S. Mark's. The Arabs and 
the Normans left ineflfaceable traces of their sojourn 
on Palermo. Naples and Messina still bear marks 
upon their churches of French workmen. All along 
the coasts we here and there find evidences of 
Oriental style imported into mediaeval Italy, while 
the impress of the Spaniard is no less manifest in 
edifices of a later period. 

Existing thus in the midst of many potent influ- 
ences, and surrounded by the ruins of past civiliza- 



RECOMBINATION OF STYLES. 45 

tions, the Italians recombined and mingled styles of 
marked variety. The Roman, Byzantine, Saracenic, 
Lombard, and German traditi'ons were blended in 
their architecture, as the presiding genius of each 
place determined. It followed that master-works of 
rare and subtle invention were produced, while no 
one type was fully perfected, nor can we point to any 
paramount Itahan manner. In Italy what was gained 
in richness and individuality was lost in uniformity 
and might. Yet we may well wonder at the versatile 
appreciation of all types of beauty that these monu- 
ments evince. How strange, for example, it is to 
think of the Venetians borrowing the form and 
structure of their temple from the mosques of Alex- 
andria, decking its fagade with the horses of Lysip- 
pus, and paneling the sanctuary with marbles from 
the harem-floors of Eastern emperors ; while at the 
other end of Italy, at Palermo, close beside the 
ruined colonnades of Segesta, Norman kings were 
embroidering their massive churches with Saracenic 
arabesques and Greek mosaics, interspersing deli- 
cate Arabian tracery with rope-patterns and mon- 
sters of the deep, and linking Cuphic sentences with 
Scandinavian runes. Meanwhile, at Rome, tombs, 
baths, and theaters had been turned into fortresses. 
The Orsini held the Mole of Hadrian ; the SaveUi 
ensconced themselves in the Theater of Marcellus, 
and the Colonnesi in the Mausoleum of Augustus ; 



46 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY, 

the Colosseum and the Arches of Constantino and 
Titus harbored the Frangipani ; the Baths of 
Trajan housed the Capocci ; while the Gaetani made 
a castle of Caecilia Metella's tomb. Under those 
vast resounding vaults swarmed a brood of me- 
diaeval bravi — like the wasps that hang their pear- 
shaped combs along the cloisters of Pavia. There 
the ghost of the dead empire still sat throned and 
sceptered. The rites of Christianity were carried on 
beneath Agrippa's dome, in Diocletian's baths, in 
the Basilicas. No other style but that of the im- 
perial people struck root near the Eternal City. 
Among her three hundred churches, Rome can only 
show one Gothic building. Further to the north, 
where German influences were more potent, the 
cathedrals still displayed, each after its own kind, a 
sunny southern waywardness. Glowing with mar- 
bles and mosaics, glittering with ornaments, where 
the foliage of the Corinthian acanthus hides the sym- 
bols of the Passion, and where birds and Cupids peep 
from tangled fruits beneath grave brows of saints 
and martyrs ; leaning now to the long low colon- 
nades of the basilica, now to the high-built arches of 
the purely pointed style ; surmounting the meeting- 
point of nave and transept with Etruscan domes ; 
covering the fagade with bass-reliefs, the roof with 
statues; raising the porch-pillars upon lions and 
winged griffins ; flanking the nave with bell-towers, 



LOMBARD, ROMANESQUE, GOTHIC. 47 

or planting them apart like flowers in isolation on 
the open square — these wonderful buildings, the 
delight and joy of all who love to trace variety in 
beauty, and to note the impress of a nation's genius 
upon its art, seem, like Italy herself, to feel all influ- 
ences and to assimilate all nationalities. 

Amid the many styles of architecture contending 
for mastery in Italy, three, before the age of the 
Revival, bid fair to win the battle. These were the 
Lombard, the Tuscan Romanesque, and the Gothic. 
Chronologically the two former flourished nearly 
during the same centuries, while Gothic, coming from 
without, suspended their development. But chro- 
nology is of little help in the history of Italian archi- 
tecture ; its main features being, not uniformity of 
progression, but synchronous diversity and salience 
of local type. What remained fixed through all 
changes in Italy was a bias toward the forms of 
Roman building, which eventually in the Renaissance, 
becoming scientifically apprehended, determined the 
taste of the whole nation. 

It is, perhaps, not wholly fanciful to say that, as 
the Lombards just failed to mold the Italians by 
conquest into a united people, so their architecture 
fell short of creating one type for the peninsula.^ From 
some points of view the historian might regret that 

'I use the term Lombard architecture here, as defined above (p. 
43, note), for the style of building prevalent in Italy during the Lonp* 
bard occupation, or just after. 



48 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

Italy did not receive that thorough subjugation in the 
eighth century which would have broken down local 
distinctions. Such regrets, however, are singularly 
idle ; for the main currents of the world's history 
move not by chance ; and how, moreover, could 
Italy have fulfilled her destiny without the divers 
forms of political existence that made her what she 
was ? Yet, standing before some of the great Lom- 
bard churches, we are inclined to speculate, perhaps 
with better reason, what the result would have 
been if that style of architecture could have assumed 
the complete ascendency over the Italians which the 
Romanesque and Gothic of the North exerted over 
France and England ? ^ The pyramidal fagade 
common in these buildings, the campanili that sus- 
pend aerial lanterns upon plain square towers, the 
domes rising tier over tier from the intersection of 
nave and transept to end in minarets and pinnacles, 
the long low colonnades of marble pilasters, the 
open porches resting upon lions, the harmonious 
blending of baked clay and rosy-tinted stone, the 
bold combination of round and pointed arches, 
and the weird invention whereby every string- 

* The essential difference between Italy and either Northern France 
or England was that in Italy there existed monuments of Roman great- 
ness, which could never be forgotten by her architects. They always 
worked with at least half of their attention turned to the past : nor had 
they the exhilarating sense of free, spontaneous, and progressive in- 
vention. This point has been well worked out by Mr. Street in the 
last chapter of his book on the ' Architecture of North Italy.' 



TUSCAN ROMANESQUE. 49 

course and capital has been carved with lions, 
sphinxes, serpents, mermaids, griffins, harpies, 
winged horses, lizards, and knights in armor — all 
these are elements that might, we fancy, have been 
developed into a noble national style. As it is, the 
churches in question are often more bizarre than 
really beautiful. Their peculiar character, however, 
is inseparably associated with the long reaches of 
green plain, the lordly rivers, and the background 
of blue hills and snowy Alps that constitute the 
charm of Lombard landscape. 

It Lombard architecture, properly so called, was 
partial in its influence and confined to a compara- 
tively narrow local sphere, the same is true of the 
Tuscan Romanesque. The church of Samminiato, 
near Florence [about 1013], and the cathedral of 
Pisa [begun 1063], not to mention numerous ex- 
amples at Lucca and Pistoja, are sufficient evidences 
that in the darkest period of the Middle Ages the 
Italians were aiming at an architectural Renaissance. 
The influence of classical models is apparent both 
in the construction and the detail of these basihcas ; 
while the deeply-grounded preference of the Italian 
genius for round arches, for colonnades of pillars 
and pilasters, and for large rectangular spaces, with 
low roofs and shallow tribunes, finds full satisfaction 
in these original and noble buildings. It is impos- 
sible to refrain from deploring that the Roman- 



50 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

esque of Tuscany should have been checked in its 
development by the intrusion of the German Gothic. 
Had it run its course unthvvarted, a national style 
suited to the temperament of the people might have 
been formed, and much that was pedantic in the 
revival of the fifteenth century have been obviated. 
The place of Gothic architecture in Italy de- 
mands fuller treatment. It was due partly to the 
direct influence of German emperors, partly to the 
imperial sympatLies of the great nobles, partly to 
the Franciscan friars, who aimed at building large 
churches cheaply, and partly to the admiration ex- 
cited by the grandeur of the Pointed style as it 
prevailed in Northern Europe, that Gothic — so alien 
to the Italian genius and climate — took root, spread 
widely, and flourished freely for a season. In thus 
enumerating the conditions favorable to the spread 
of Gottico-Tedesco, I am far from wishing to assert 
that this style was purely foreign. Italy, in com- 
mon with the rest of Europe, passed by a natural 
process of evolution from the Romanesque to the 
Pointed manner, and treated the latter with an 
originality that proves sincere and deep assimila- 
tion. Yet the first Gothic church, that of S. 
Francis at Assisi, was designed by a German ; the 
most splendid, that of Our Lady at Milan, is em- 
phatically German.^ During the comparatively brief 

* Even though it be now proved that not Heinrich von Gmunden, 



GOTHIC, 51 

period of Gothic ascendency the Italians never for- 
got their Latin and Lombard sympathies. The 
mood of mind in which they Gothicized was partial 
and transient. The evolution of this style was, 
therefore, neither so spontaneous and simple, nor 
yet so uninterrupted and romplete, in Italy as 
in the North. While it produced the church of 
S. Francesco at Assisi and the cathedrals of Siena, 
Orvieto, Lucca, Bologna, Florence, and Milan, 
together with the town-halls of Perugia, Siena, 
and Florence, it failed to take firm hold upon the 
national taste, and died away before the growing 
passion for antiquity that restored the Italians to 
a sense of their own intellectual greatness. It is 
clear that, as soon as they were conscious of their 
vocation to revive the culture of the classic age, 
they at once and forever abandoned the style appro- 
priate to northern feudalism. They seem to have 
adopted it half-unwillingly, and to have understood 
it only in the imperfect way in which they compre- 
hended chivalry. 

The Italians never rightly apprehended the spe- 
cific nature of Gothic architecture. They could not 
forget the horizontal lines, flat roofs, and blank walls 
of the Basilica. Like their Roman ancestors, they 
aimed at covering the ground with the smallest pos- 

but Marco Frisone da Campione, not a German, but a Milanese was 
the first architect, this is none the less true about its style. 



52 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

sible expenditure of construction ; to inclose large 
spaces within simple limits was their first object, and 
the effect of beauty or sublimity was gained by the 
proportions given to the total area. When, there- 
fore, they adopted the Gothic style, they failed to 
perceive that its true merit consists in the negation 
of nearly all that the Latin style holds precious. 
Horizontal lines are as far as possible annihilated ; 
walls are lost in windows ; aisles and columns, apses 
and chapels, are multiplied with a view to complexity 
of architectonic effect ; flat roofs become intolerable. 
The whole force employed in the construction has 
an upward tendency, and the spire is the completion 
of the edifice ; for to the spire its countless soaring 
lines — lines not of stationary strength, but of as- 
cendant growth — converge. All this the Italians 
were slow to comprehend. The campanile, for 
example, never became an integral part of their 
buildings. It stood alone, and was reserved for 
its original purpose of keeping the bells. The 
windows, for a reason very natural in Italy, where 
there is rather too much than too little sunlight, 
were curtailed ; and instead of the multiplied bays 
and clustered columns of a northern Gothic aisle, 
the nave of so vast a church as S. Petronio at 
Bologna is measured by six arches raised on simple 
piers. The fagade of an Italian cathedral was 
studied as a screen, quite independently of its rela- 



DEFECTS AND QUALITIES OF ITALIAN GOTHIC. 53 

tion to the interior; in the beautiful church of 
Crema, for example, the moon at night looks 
through the upper windows of a frontispiece raised 
far above the low roof of the nave. For the total 
effect of the exterior, as will be apparent to any one 
who observes the Duomo of Orvieto from behind, 
no thought was taken. In this way the Italians 
missed the point and failed to perceive the poetry of 
Gothic architecture. Its symbolical significance was 
lost upon them; perhaps we ought to say that 
the Italian temperament, in art as in religion, was 
incapable of assimilating the vague yet powerful 
mysticism of the Teutonic races. 

On the other hand, what they sacrificed of 
genuine Gothic character was made good after their 
own fashion. Surface decoration, whether of fresco 
or mosaic, bronze-work or bass-relief, wood-carving 
or paneling in marble, baked clay or enameled 
earthenware, was never carried to such perfection 
in Gothic buildings of the purer type; nor had 
sculpture in the North an equal chance of detaching 
itself from the niche and tabernacle, which forced 
it to remain the slave of architecture. Thus the 
comparative defects of Italian Gothic were directly 
helpful in promoting those very arts for which the 
people had a genius unrivaled among modern 
nations. 

It is only necessary to contrast the two finest 



54 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

cathedrals of this style, those of Siena and Orvieto, 
with two such buildings as the cathedrals of Rheims 
and Salisbury, in order to perceive the structural 
inferiority of the former, as well as their superiority 
for all subordinate artistic purposes. Long straight 
lines, low roofs, narrow windows, a fagade of sur- 
prising splendor but without a strict relation to 
the structure of the nave and aisles, a cupola sur- 
mounting the intersection of nave, choir, and tran- 
septs ; simple tribunes at the east end, a detached 
campanile, round columns instead of clustered piers, 
a mixture of semicircular and pointed arches ; these 
are some of the most salient features of the Sienese 
Duomo. But the material is all magnificent ; and 
the hand, obedient to the dictates of an artist's 
brain, has made itself felt on every square foot of 
the building. Alternate courses of white and black 
marble, cornices loaded with grave or animated 
portraits of the Popes, sculptured shrines, altars, 
pulpits, reliquaries, fonts and holy-water vases, 
panels of inlaid wood and pictured pavements, 
bronze candelabra and wrought-iron screens, gild- 
ing and color and precious work of agate and 
lapis lazuli — the masterpieces of men famous each 
in his own line — delight the eye in all directions. 
The whole church is a miracle of richness, a radiant 
and glowing triumph of inventive genius, the pro- 
duct of a hundred master-craftsmen toiling through 



CATHEDRAL OF SIENA. 55 

successive centuries to do their best. All its count- 
less details are so harmonized by the controlling 
taste, so brought together piece by piece in obe- 
dience to artistic instinct, that the total effect is 
ravishingly beautiful. Yet it is clear that no one 
paramount idea, determining and organizing all 
these marvels, existed in the mind of the first 
architect. In true Gothic work the details that 
make up the charm of this cathedral would have 
been subordinated to one architectonic thought; 
they would not have been suffered to assert their 
individuality, or to contribute, except as servants, 
to the whole effect. The northern Gothic church 
is like a body with several members ; the southern 
Gothic church is an accretion of beautiful atoms. 
The northern Gothic style corresponds to the 
national unity of federalized races, organized by a 
social hierarchy of mutually dependent classes. In 
the southern Gothic style we find a mirror of politi- 
cal diversity, independent personality, burgher-like 
equality, despotic will. Thus the specific qualities 
of Italy on her emergence from the Middle Ages 
may be traced by no undue exercise of the fancy in 
her monuments. They are emphatically the crea- 
tion of citizens — of men, to use Giannotti's phrase, 
distinguished by alternating obedience and com- 
mand, not ranked beneath a monarchy, but capable 
themselves of sovereign power.^ 

* See 'Age of the Despots,' p. 196. 



56 RENAISSANCE IN ITAL F. 

What has been said of Siena is no less true of 
the Duomo of Orvieto. Though it seems to aim 
at a severer Gothic, and though the fagade is more 
architecturally planned, a single glance at the ex- 
terior of the edifice shows that the builders had no 
lively sense of the requirements of the style they 
used. What can be more melancholy than those 
blank walls, broken by small round recesses pro- 
truding from the side-chapels of the nave, those 
gaunt and barren angles at the east end, and those 
few pinnacles appended at a venture? Noting 
these shortcomings, we are irresistibly reminded 
of Horace Walpole's achievements at Strawberry 
Hill. On the other hand, the interior is noble. 
The feeling for space possessed by the architect 
has expressed itself in proportions large and solemn ; 
the area inclosed, though somewhat cold and vacu- 
ous to Northern taste, is at least impressive by its 
severe harmony. But the real attractions of the 
church are isolated details. Wherever the indi- 
vidual artist-mind has had occasion to emerge, there 
our gaze is riveted, our criticism challenged, our 
admiration won. The frescoes of Signorelli, the 
bass-reliefs of the Pisani, the statuary of Lo Scalza 
and Mosca, the tarsia of the choir stalls, the Alex- 
andrine work and mosaics of the fagade, the bronzes 
placed upon its brackets, and the wrought acanthus 
scrolls of its superb pilasters — these are the objects 



CATHEDRALS OF ORVIETO AND MILAN. 57 

for inexhaustible wonder in the cathedral of Or- 
vieto. On approaching a building of this type, we 
must abandon our conceptions of organic architec- 
ture : only the Greek and northern Gothic styles 
deserve that epithet. We must not seek for severe 
discipline and architectonic design. Instead of one 
presiding, all-determining idea, we must be prepared 
to welcome a wealth of separate beauties, wrought 
out by men of independent genius, whereby each 
part is made a masterpiece, and many diverse 
elements become a whole of picturesque rather 
than architectural impressiveness. 

It would not be difficult to extend this kind of 
criticism to the Duomo of Milan. Speaking strictly, 
a more unlucky combination of different styles — 
the pyramidal fagade of Lombard architecture and 
the long thin lights of German Gothic, for example 
— or a clumsier misuse of ill-appropriated details 
in the heavy piers of the nave and the monster 
windows of the east end, could scarcely be im- 
agined. Yet no other church, perhaps, in Europe 
leaves the same impression of the marvelous upon 
the fancy. The splendor of its pure white marble 
blushing with the rose of evening or of dawn, ra« 
diant in noonday sunlight, and fabulously fairy-like 
beneath the moon and stars, the multitudes of stat- 
ues sharply cut against a clear blue sky, and gazing 
at the Alps across that memorable tract of plain, 



58 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

the immense space and light-irradiated gloom oi 
the interior, the deep tone of the bells above at 
a vast distance, and the gorgeous colors of the 
painted glass, contribute to a scenical effect un- 
paralleled in Christendom. 

The two styles, Lombard and Gothic, of which 
I have been speaking were both in a certain sense 
exotic. Within the great cities the pith of the 
population was Latin ; and no style of building that 
did not continue the tradition of the Romans satis- 
fied them. It was a main feature of the Renais- 
sance that, when the Italians undertook the task of 
reuniting themselves by study with the past, they 
abandoned all other forms of architecture, and did 
their best to create one in harmony with the relics 
of Latin monuments. To trace the history of this 
revived classic architecture will occupy me later in 
this chapter; but for the moment it is necessary to 
turn aside and consider briefly the'^secular buildings 
of Italy before the date of the Renaissance proper. 

About the same time that the cathedrals were 
being built, the nobles filled the towns with fortresses. 
These at first were gaunt and unsightly ; how over- 
crowded with tall, bare towers a mediaeval Italian 
city could be is still shown by San Gemignano, the 
only existing instance where the torro7ii have been 
left untouched.^ In course of time, when the aris- 

* Pavia, it may be mentioned, has still many towers standing, and 
tiie two at Bologna are famous. 



SECULAR BUILDINGS. 59 

tocracy came to be fused with the burghers, and 
public order was maintained by law in the great 
cities, these forts made way for spacious palaces. 
The temper of the citizens in each place and the 
local character of artistic taste determined the specific 
features of domestic as of ecclesiastical architecture. 
Though it is hard to define what are the social differ- 
ences expressed by the large quadrangles of Fran- 
cesco Sforza's hospital at Milan, and the heavy cube 
of the Riccardi palace at Florence, we feel that the 
genius loci has in each case controlled the architect. 
The sunny spaces of the one building, with its terra- 
cotta traceries of birds and grapes and Cupids, con- 
trast with the stern brown moldings and impen- 
etrable solidity of the other. That the one was 
raised by the munificence of a sovereign in his capi- 
tal, while the other was the dwelling of a burgher in 
a city proud of its antique sobriety, goes some way 
to explain the difference. In like manner the court- 
life of a dynastic principality produced the castle of 
Urbino, so diverse in its style and adaptation from 
the ostentatious mansions of the Genoese mer- 
chants. It is not fanciful to say that the civic life of 
a free and factious repubhc is represented by the 
heavy walls and narrow windows of Florentine 
dwelling-places. In their rings of iron, welded be- 
tween rock and rock about the basement, as though 
for the beginning of a barricade — in their torch- 



6o RENAISSANCE IN ITAL V. 

rests of wrought metal, gloomy portals and dimly- 
lighted courts, we trace the habits of caution and 
reserve that marked the men who led the parties of 
Uberti and Albizzi. The Sienese palaces are lighter 
and more elegant in style, as belonging to a people 
proverbially pleasure-loving ; while a still more sump- 
tuous and secure mode of life finds expression in 
the open loggie and spacious staircases of Venice. 
The graceful buildings that overhang the Grand 
Canal are exactly fitted for an oligarchy, sure of its 
own authority and loved by the people. Feudal 
despotism, on the contrary, reigns in the heart -of 
Ferrara, where the Este's stronghold, moated, draw- 
bridged, and portcullised, casting dense shadow over 
the water that protects the dungeons, still seems to 
threaten the public square and overawe the homes 
of men. 

To the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, again, 
we owe the town halls and public palaces that 
form so prominent a feature in the city architec- 
ture of Italy. The central vitality of once powerful 
states is symbolized in the broletti of the Lombard 
cities, dusty and abandoned now in spite of their 
clear-cut terra-cotta traceries. There is something 
strangely melancholy in their desolation. Wander- 
ing through the vast hall of the Ragione at Padua, 
where the very shadows seem asleep as they glide 
over the wide unpeopled floor, it is not easy to 



PUBLIC PALACES. 61 

remember that this was once the theater of eager 
intrigues, ere the busy stir of the old burgh was 
utterly extinguished. Few of these public palaces 
have the good fortune to be distinguished, Hke that 
of the Doge at Venice, by world-historical memories 
and by works of art as yet unrivaled. The spirit 
of the Venetian Republic still lives in that unique 
building. Architects may tell us that its Gothic 
arcades are melodramatic ; sculptors may depreciate 
the decorative work of Sansovino ; painters may 
assert that the genius of Titian, Tintoret, and Vero- 
nese shines elsewhere with greater luster. Yet the 
poet clings with ever-deepening admiration to the 
sea-born palace of the ancient mistress of the sea, 
and the historian feels that here, as at Athens, art 
has made the past toward which he looks eternal. 

Two other great Italian houses of the Common- 
wealth, rearing their towers above the town for 
tocsin and for ward, owe immortality to their intrin- 
sic beauty. These are the Palazzo Pubblico of Siena 
and the Palazzo Vecchio of Florence. Few buildings 
in Europe are more picturesquely fascinating than the 
palace of Siena, with its outlook over hill and dale 
to cloud-capped Monte Amiata. Yet, in spite of 
its unparalleled position on the curved and sloping 
piazza, where the contrade of Siena have run their 
palio for centuries, this palace lacks the vivid 
interest attaching to the home Arnolfo raised at 



62 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

Florence for the rulers oi his native city. During 
their term of office the Priors never quitted the 
palace of the Signory. All deliberations on state 
affairs took place within its walls, and its bell was 
the pulse that told how the heart of Florence 
throbbed. The architect of this huge mass of 
masonry was Arnolfo del Cambio, one of the 
greatest builders of the Middle Ages, a man who 
may be called the Michael Angelo of the thirteenth 
century.^ In 1298 he was ordered to erect a dwell- 
ing-place for the Commonwealth, to the end that 
the people might be protected in their fortress from 
the violence of the nobles. The building of the 
palace and the leveling of the square around it 
were attended with circumstances that bring forcibly 
before our minds the stern conditions of republican 
life in mediaeval Italy. A block 01 houses had to be 
bought from the family of Foraboschi ; and their 
tower, called Torre della Vacca, was raised and 
turned into the belfry of the Priors. There was 
not room enough, however, to construct the palace 
itself with right angles, unless it were extended into 
the open space where once had stood the houses of 

^ Arnolfo was born in 1232 at Colle, in the Val d'Elsa. He was a 
sculptor as well as architect, the assistant of Niccola Pisano at Siena, 
and the maker of the tomb of Cardinal de Braye at Or\'ieto. This 
tomb is remarkable as the earliest instance of the canopy withdrawn 
by attendant angels from the dead man's form, afterwards so fre- 
quently adopted by the Pisan school. 



PALACE OF THE SIGNOR Y AT FLORENCE. 63 

the Uberti, ' traitors to Florence and Ghibellines.' 
In destroying these, the burghers had decreed that 
thenceforth forever the feet of men should pass 
where the hearths of the proscribed nobles once had 
blazed. Arnolfo begged that he might trespass on 
this site ; but the people refused permission. Where 
the traitors' nest had been, there the sacred founda- 
tions of the public house should not be laid. Con- 
sequently the Florentine Palazzo is, was, and will be 
cramped of its correct proportions.^ 

No Italian architect has enjoyed the proud 
privilege of stamping his own individuality more 
strongly on his native city than Arnolfo ; and for 
this reason it may be permitted to enlarge upon his 
labors here. When we take our stand upon the 
hill of Samminiato, the Florence at our feet owes 
her physiognomy in a great measure to this man. 
The tall tower of the Palazzo Vecchio, the bulk of 
the Duomo, and the long low oblong mass cl Santa 
Croce are all his. His too are the walls that define 
the city of flowers from the gardens round about 
her.^ Even the master-works of his successors sub- 
ordinate their beauty to his first conception. Giotto's 
campanile, Brunelleschi's cupola, and Orcagna's 
church of Orsammichele, in spite of their undoubted 

^ Giov. Villani, viii. 26. 

^ See Milizia, vol. i. p. 135. These vralls were not finished till 
some time after Amolfo's death. They lost their ornament of towers 
i.n the siege of 1529, and they are now being rapidly destroyed. 



64 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

an I authentic originality, are placed where he had 
pla nned. 

In 1294 the Florentines determined to rebuild 
their mother-church upon a scale of unexampled 
grandeur. The commission given to their architect 
displays so strikingly the lordly spirit in which these 
burghers set about the work, that, though it has 
been often quoted, a portion of the document shall 
be recited here. * Since the highest mark of pru- 
dence in a people of noble origin is to proceed in 
the management of their affairs so that their mag- 
nanimity and wisdom may be evinced in their out- 
ward acts, we order Arnolfo, head-master of our 
commune, to make a design for the renovation of 
Santa Reparata in a style pf magnificence which 
neither the industry nor the power of man can sur- 
pass, that it may harmonize with the opinion oi many 
wise persons in this city and state, who think that 
this commune should not engage in any enterprise 
unless its intention be to make the result correspond 
with that noblest sort of heart which is composed of 
the united will of many citizens.' ^ From Giovanni 
Villani we learn what taxes were levied by the 
Wool-Guild, and set apart in 133 1 for the completion 
of the building. They were raised upon all goods 
bought or sold within the city in two separate rates, 
the net produce amounting in the first year to 2,000 

' From Perkins's 'Tuscan Sculptors,' vol i. p. 54. 



THE DUOMO OF FLORENCE. 65 

lire.^ The cathedral designed by Arnolfo was of 
vast dimensions : it covers 84,802 feet, while that of 
Cologne covers 81,461 feet; and, says Fergusson, 
' as far as mere conception of plan goes, there can be 
little doubt but that the Florentine cathedral far 
surpasses its German rival.* ^ Nothing, indeed, can 
be imagined more noble than the scheme of this 
huge edifice. Studying its ground-plan, and noting 
how the nave unfolds into a mighty octagon, which 
in its turn displays three well-proportioned apses, we 
are induced to think that a sublimer thought has 
never been expressed in stone. At this point, how- 
ever, our admiration receives a check. In the execu- 
tion of the parts Arnolfo dwarfed the building he 
had conceived on so magnificent a scale ; aiming at 
colossal simplicity, he failed to secure the multiplicity 
of subordinated members essential to the total effect 
of size. ' Like all inexperienced architects, he seems 
to have thought that greatness of parts would add 
to the greatness of the whole, and in consequence 
used only four great arches in the whole length of 
his nave, giving the central aisle a width of fifty-five 
feet clear. The whole width is within ten feet of 
that of Cologne, and the height about the same; 
and yet in appearance the height is about half, 
and the breadth less than half, owing to the better 

* Giov. Villani, x. 192. 

* ' Illustrated Handbook of Architecture,' book vi. chap. i. 



66 RENAISSANCE IN ITAL K 

proportion of the parts and to the superior appro- 
priateness in the details on the part of the German 
cathedral.'^ The truth of these remarks will be 
felt by every one on whom the ponderous vacuity of 
the interior has weighed. Other notable defects 
there are too in this building, proceeding chiefly 
from the Italian misconception of Gothic style. The 
windows are few and narrow, so that little light 
even at noonday struggles through them ; and broad 
barren spaces of gray walls oppress the eye. Ex- 
ternally the whole church is paneled with parti- 
colored marbles, according to Florentine custom ; 
but this paneling bears no relation to the structure : 
it is so much surface decoration possessing value 
chiefly for the colorist. ^Arnolfo died before the 
dome, as he designed it, could be placed upon the 
octagon, and nothing is known for certain about the 
form he meant it to assume. It seems, however, 
probable that he intended to adopt something similar 
to the dome of Chiaravalle, which ends, after a suc- 
cession of narrowing octagons, in a slender conical 
pyramid.^ Subordinate spires would then have been 
placed at each of the four angles where the nave and 
transepts intersect; and the whole external effect, 
for richness and variety, would have outrivaled that 
of any European building. It is well known that 

' 'Illustrated Handbook of Architecture,' book vi. chap. i. 
' See Grliner's 'Terra Cotta Architecture of North Italy,' plates 3 
and 4. 



ARNOLFO AND BRUNELLESCHI. 67 

the erection of the dome was finally intrusted to 
^Brunelleschi in 1420. Arnolfo's church now sus- 
tains in air an octagonal cupola of the simplest pos- 
sible design, in height and size rivaling that of S. 
Peter's. It was thus that the genius of the Renais- 
sance completed what the genius of the Middle Ages 
had begun. But in Italy there was no real break 
between the two periods. Though Arnolfo em- 
ployed the pointed style in his design, we find 
nothing genuinely Gothic in the church. It has no 
pinnacles, flying buttresses, side chapels, or subordi- 
nate supports. To use the phrase of Michelet, who 
has chosen the dramatic episode of Brunelleschi's 
intervention in the rearing of the dome for a parable 
of the Renaissance, ' the colossal church stood up 
simply, naturally, as a strong man in the morning 
rises from his bed without the need of staff or 
crutch.'^ This indeed is the glory of Itahan as 
compared with Northern architecture. The Italians 
valued the strength of simple perspicuity : all the 
best works of their builders are geometrical ideas of 
the purest kind translated into stone. It is, however, 
true that the gain of vast aerial space was hardly 

^ Compare what Alberti says in his preface to the Treatise on 
Painting, 'Opere,' vol. iv. p. 12. 'Chi mai si duro e si invido non 
lodasse Pippo architetto vedendo qui struttura si grande, erta sopra \ 
cieli, ampla da coprire con sua ombra tutti i popoli toscani, fatta sanza 
alcuno aiuto di travamenti o di copia di legname, quale artificio certo, 
se io ben giudico, come a questi tempi era incredibile potersi, cosi 
forse appresso gli antiqui fu non saputo n^ conosciuto ?' 



68 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY, 

sufficient to compensate for the impression of emp- 
tiness they leave upon the senses. We feel this 
very strongly when we study the model prepared by 
Bramante's pupil, Cristoforo Rocchi, for the cathe- 
dral of Pavia ; yet here we see the neo-Latin genius 
of the Italian artist working freely in an element 
exactly suited to his powers. When the same order 
of genius sought to express its conception through 
the language of the Gothic style, the result was in • 
variably defective.^ 

The classical revival of the fifteenth century 
made itself immediately felt in architecture ; and 
Brunelleschi's visit to Rome in 1403 may be fixed as 
the date of the Renaissance in this art. Gothic, as 
we have already seen, was an alien in Italy. Its 
importation from the North had checked the free 
development of national architecture, which in the 
eleventh century began at Pisa by a conscious return 
to classic details. But the reign of Gothic was 
destined to be brief. Petrarch and Boccaccio, as I 
showed in my last volume, turned the whole intel- 
lectual energy of the Florentines into the channels 

* What the church of S. Petronio at Bologna would have been, 
if it had been completed on the scale contemplated, can hardly be 
imagined. As it stands, it is immense, and coldly bare in its immen- 
sity. Yet the present church is but the nave of a temple designed 
with transepts and choir. The length was to have been 800 feet, the 
width of the transepts 525, the dome 183 feet in diameter. A building 
so colossal in extent, and so monotonously meager in conception, could 
not but have been a failure. 



REVIVAL OF THE ROMAN STYLE. 69 

of Latin and Greek scholarship.^ The ancient 
world absorbed all interests, and the Italians with 
one will shook themselves free of the mediaeval 
style they never rightly understood, and which they 
henceforth stigmatized as barbarous.^ 

The problem that occupied all the Renaissance 
architects was how to restore the manner of ancient 
Rome as far as possible, adapting it to the modern 
requirements of ecclesiastical, civic, and domestic 
buildings. Of Greek art they knew comparatively 
nothing : nor indeed could Greek architecture have 
offered for their purpose the same plastic elements 
as Roman — itself a derived style, admitting of 
easier adjustment to modern uses than the inflexibly 
pure art of Greece. At the same time they pos- 
sessed but imperfect fragments of Roman work. 
The ruins of baths, theaters, tombs, temple-fronts, 
and triumphal arches were of little immediate assist- 
ance in the labor of designing churches and 
palaces. All that the architects could do, after 
familiarizing themselves with the remains of ancient 

^ ' Revival of Learning,' chap. ii. 

' The following passage quoted from Milizia, * Memorie degli Ar- 
chitetti,' Parma, 1781, vol. i. p. 135, illustrates the contemptuous atti- 
tude of Italian critics to Gothic architecture. After describing 
Amolfo's building of the Florentine Duomo, he proceeds : ' In questo 
Architetto si vide qualche leggiero barlume di buona Architettura, 
come di Pittura in Cimabue suo contemporaneo. Ma in tutte le cose 
e fisiche e morali i passaggi si fanno per insensibili gradagioni ; onde 
per lungo tempo ancora si mantenne il corrotto gusto, che si pu6 chi- 
amare Arabo-Tedesco.' 



70 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY, 

Rome, and assimilating the spirit of Roman art, was 
to clothe their own inventions with classic details. 
The form and structure of their edifices were mod- 
ern ; the parts were copied from antique models. 
A want of organic unity and structural sincerity is 
always the result of those necessities under which a 
secondary and adapted style must labor ; and thus 
the pseudo-Roman buildings even of the best Re- 
naissance period display faults similar to those of 
the Italian Gothic. While they are remarkable for 
grandeur of effect in all that concerns the distribu- 
tion of light and shade, the covering and inclosing 
of space, and the disposition of masses, they show 
at best but a superficial correspondence between the 
borrowed forms and the construction these are used 
to mask.^ The edifices of this period abound in 
more or less successful shams, in surface decoration 
more or less pleasing to the eye ; their real greatness, 
meanwhile, consists in the feeling for spatial propor- 
tions and for linear harmonies possessed by their 
architects. 

Three periods in the development of Renaissance 
architecture may be roughly marked.^ The first, 
extending from 1420 to 1500, is the age of experi- 

* Observe, for example, the casing of a Gothic church at Rimini 
by Alberti with a series of Roman arches ; or the fagade of S. Andrea 
at Mantua, where the vast and lofty central arch leads, not into the 
nave itself, but into a shallow vestibule. 
' See Burckhardt, * Cicerone,' vol. i. p. 167. 



THREE PERIODS OF RENAISSANCE WORK, 71 

ment and of luxuriant inventiveness. The second 
embraces the first forty years of the sixteenth 
century. The most perfect buildings of the Italian 
Renaissance were produced within this short space 
of time. The third, again comprising about forty 
years, from 1540 to 1580, leads onward to the 
reign of mannerism and exaggeration, called by the 
Italians barocco. In itself the third period is distin- 
guished by a scrupulous purism bordering upon 
pedantry, strict adherence to theoretical rules, and 
sacrifice of inventive qualities to established canons. 
To do more than briefly indicate the masterpieces 
of these three periods would be impossible in a 
work that does not pretend to treat of architecture 
exhaustively : and yet to omit all notice of the 
builders of this age and of their styles would be to 
neglect the most important art-phase of the time I 
have undertaken to illustrate. 

In the first period we are bewildered by the luxu- 
riance of creative powers and by the rioting of the 
fancy in all forms of beauty indiscriminately mingled. 
In general we detect a striving after effects not fully 
realized, and a tendency to indulge in superfluous 
ornament without regard for strictness of design. 
The imperfect comprehension of classical models 
and the exuberant vivacity of the imagination in the 
fifteenth century account for the florid work of this 
time. Something too is left of mediaeval fancy ; 



72 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY, 

the details borrowed from the antique undergo fan- 
tastic transmutation at the hands of men accustomed 
to the vehement emotion of the romantic ages. What- 
ever the Renaissance took from antique art, it was 
at first unable to assimilate either the moderation of 
the Greeks or the practical sobriety of the Romans. 
Christianity had deepened and intensified the sources 
of imaginative life ; and just as reminiscences of 
classic style impaired Italian Gothic, so now a trace 
of Gothic is perceptible in the would-be classic work 
of the Revival. The result of these combined in- 
fluences was a wonderful and many-featured hybrid, 
best represented in one monument by the fagade of 
the Certosa at Pavia. While characterizing the 
work of the earlier Renaissance as fused of divers 
manners, we must not forget that it was truly living, 
full of purpose, and, according to its own standard, 
sincere. It was a new birth ; no mere repetition of 
something dead and gone, but the product of vivid 
forces stirred to original creativeness by admiration 
for the past. It corresponded, moreover, with ex- 
quisite exactitude to the halting of the conscience 
between Christianity and paganism, and to the blent 
beauty that the poets loved. On reeds dropped 
from the hands of dead Pan the artists of this period, 
each in his own sphere, piped ditties of romance. 

To these general remarks upon the style of the 
first period the Florentine architects offer an excep- 



BRUI^ELLESCHL 73 

tion ; and yet the first marked sign of a new era in 
the art of building was given at Florence. Purity of 
taste and firmness of judgment, combined with 
scientific accuracy, were always distinctive c:^ Flo- 
rentines. To such an extent did these qualities 
determine their treatment oi the arts that acute 
critics have been found to tax them with hardness 
and frigidity.^ Brunelleschi in 1425 designed the 
basilica of S. Lorenzo after an original but truly 
classic type, remarkable for its sobriety and cor^ 
rectness. What he had learned from the ruins of 
Rome he here applied in obedience to his own 
artistic instinct. S. Lorenzo is a columnar edifice 
with round arches and semicircular apses. Not 
a form or detail in the whole church is strictly 
speaking at variance with Roman precedent ; and 
yet the general effect resembles nothing we possess of 
antique work. It is a masterpiece of intelligent Re- 
naissance adaptation. The same is true of S. Spirito, 
built in 1470, after Brunelleschi's death, according 
to his plans. The extraordinary capacity ot this 
great architect will, however, win more homage from 
ordinary observers when they contemplate the Pitti 
Palace and the cupola of the cathedral. Both ot these 
are masterworks of personal originality. What is 
Roman in the Pitti Palace is the robust simplicity 
of massive strength ; but it is certain that nc patri- 
* See De Stendhal, ' Histoire de la Peinture en Italic/ p. 123. 



74 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY, 

cian of the republic or the empire inhabited a house 
at all resembling this. The domestic habits of the 
Middle Ages, armed for self-defense, and on guard 
against invasion from without, still find expres- 
sion in the solid bulk of this forbidding dwelling- 
place, although its majesty and largeness show that 
the reign of milder and more courtly manners has 
begun. To speak of the cupola of the Duomo in 
connection with a simple revival of Roman taste 
would be equally inappropriate. It remains a tour 
deforce of individual genius, cultivated by the expe- 
rience of Gothic vault-building, and penetrated with 
the greatness of imperial Rome. Its spirit of dauntless 
audacity and severe concentration alone is antique. 

Almost contemporary with Brunelleschi was Leo 
Battista Alberti, a Florentine, who, working upon 
somewhat different principles, sought more closely to 
reproduce the actual elements of Roman architecture.^ 
In his remodeling of S. Francesco at Rimini the 
type he followed was that of the triumphal arch, and 
what was finished of that wonderful fagade remains 
to prove how much might have been made of well- 
proportioned pilasters and nobly-curved arcades.^ 



* For a notice of his life, see ' Revival of Learning,* p. 341. 

^ The Arch of Augustus at Rimini w^as the model followed by 
Alberti in this fagade. He intended to cover the church with a cupola, 
as may be seen from the design on a medal of Sigismondo Pandolfc 
Malatesta. See too the letter written by him to Matteo da Bastia, 
Alberti, ' Opere,' vol. iv. p. 397. 



ALBERT!, 75 

The same principle is carried out in S. Andrea at 
Mantua. The frontispiece of this church is a 
gigantic arch of triumph ; the interior is noticeable 
for its simple harmony of parts, adopted from the 
vaulted baths of Rome. The combination of these 
antique details in an imposing structure implied a 
high imaginative faculty at a moment when the rules 
of classic architecture had not been as yet reduced to 
method. Yet the weakness of Alberti's principle is 
revealed when we consider that here the lofty cen- 
tral arch of the fagade serves only for a decoration. 
Too high and spacious even for the chariots of a 
Roman triumph, it forms an inappropriate entrance 
to the modest vestibule of a Christian church. 

Like Brunelleschi, Alberti applied his talents to 
the building of a palace in Florence that became a 
model to subsequent architects. The Palazzo Ru- 
cellai retains many details of the mediaeval Tuscan 
style, especially in the windows divided by slender 
pilasters. But the three orders introduced by way 
of surface decoration, the doorwa\7S und the cornices, 
are transcripts from Roman ruins. This building, 
one of the most beautiful in Italy, was copied by 
Francesco di Giorgio and Bernardo Florentino for 
the palaces they constructed at Pienza. 

This was the age of sumptuous palace-building ; 
and for no purpose was the early Renaissance style 
better adapted than for the erection of dwelling- 



76 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

houses that should match the free and worldly 
splendor of those times. The just medium be- 
tween mediaeval massiveness and classic simplicity 
was attained in countless buildings beautiful and 
various beyond description. Bologna is full of them ; 
and Urbino, in the Ducal Palace, contains one spe- 
cimen unexampled in extent and unique in interest. 
Yet here, as in all departments of fine art, Florence 
takes the lead. After Brunelleschi and Alberti 
came Michellozzo, the favorite architect of Cosimo 
de' Medici ; Benedetto da Majano ; Giuliano and 
Antonio di San Gallo ; and II Cronaca. Cosimo de* 
Medici, having said that ' envy is a plant no man 
should water,' denied himself the monumental house 
designed by Brunelleschi, and chose instead the 
modest plan of Michellozzo. Brunelleschi had meant 
to build the Casa Medici along one side of the 
Piazza di S. Lorenzo; but when Cosimo refused 
his project, he broke up the model he had made, to 
the great loss of students of this age of architecture. 
Michellozzo was then commissioned to raise the 
mighty, but comparatively humble, Riccardi Palace 
at the corner of the Via Larga, which continued to 
be the residence of the Medici through all their 
checkered history, until at last they took possession 
of the Palazzo Pitti.^ The most beautiful of all 



' This ancestral palace of the Medici passed in 1659 to the Mar- 
chese Gabriele Riccardi, from the Duke Francesco II. 



PALACES OF THE FIRST PERIOD, 77 

Florentine dwelling-houses designed at this period 
is that which Benedetto da Majano built for Filippo 
Strozzi. Combining the burgher-like austerity of 
antecedent ages with a grandeur and a breadth ot 
style peculiar to the Renaissance, the Palazzo 
Strozzi may be chosen as the perfect type of Flor- 
entine domestic architecture.^ Other cities were 
supplied by Florence with builders, and Milan owed 
her fanciful Ospedale Maggiore at this epoch to 
Antonio Filarete, a Florentine. This great edifice 
illustrates the emancipation from fixed rule that dis- 
tinguishes much of the architecture of the earlier 
Renaissance. The detail is not unfrequently Gothic, 
especially in the pointed windows ; but the feeling 
of the whole structure, in its airy space and light- 
ness, delicate terra-cotta moldings, and open loggie, 
is truly Cinque Cento.^ 

^ Von Reumont, * Lorenzo de' Medici,' vol. ii. pp. 187-191, may be 
consulted for an interesting account of the building of this Casa 
Grande by Filippo Strozzi. The preparations were made with great 
caution, lest it should seem that a work too magnificent for a simple 
citizen was being undertaken ; in particular, Filippo so contrived that 
the costly opus rustzcum employed in the construction of the basement 
should appear to have been forced upon him. This is characteristic 
of Florence in the days of Cosimo. The foundation stone was laid in 
the morning of August 16, 1489, at the moment when the sun arose 
above the summits of the Casentino. The hour, prescribed by as- 
trologers as propitious, had been settled by the horoscope ; masses 
meanwhile were said in several churches, and alms distributed. 

^ Antonio Filarete, or Averulino, architect and sculptor, was author 
of a treatise on the building of the ideal city, one of the most curious 
specimens of Renaissance fancy, to judge from the account rendered 
of the manuscript by Rio, vol. iii. pp. 321-328, 



78 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY, 

In no other style than this of the earlier Renais- 
sance is the builder more inseparably connected 
with the decorator. The labors of the stone- 
carver, who provided altars chased with Scripture 
histories in high relief, pulpits hung against a col- 
umn of the nave, tombs with canopies and floral 
garlands, organ galleries enriched with bass-reliefs of 
singing boys, ciboria with kneeling and adoring 
angels, marble tabernacles for relics, vases for holy 
water, fonts and fountains, and all the indescribable 
wealth of scrolls and friezes around doors and 
screens and balustrades that fence the choir, are 
added to those of the bronze-founder, with his 
mighty doors and pendent lamps, his candelabra 
sustained by angels, torch-rests and rings, embossed 
basements for banners of state, and portraits of re- 
cumbent senators or prelates.^ The wood-carver 
contributes tarsia like that of Fra Giovanni da Ve- 
rona.^ The worker in wrought iron welds such 

^ Matteo Civitale, Benedetto da Majano, Mino da Fiesole, Luca 
della Robbia, Donatello, Jacopo della Quercia, Lo Scalza, Omodeo, 
and the Sansovini, not to mention less illustrious sculptors, filled the 
churches of Italy with this elaborate stone-work. Among the bronze 
founders it is enough to name Ghiberti, Antonio Filarete, Antonio Pol- 
lajuolo, Donatello and his pupil Bertoldo, Andrea Riccio, the master 
of the candelabrum in S. Antonio at Padua, Jacopo Sansovino, the 
master of the door of the sacristy in S. Mark's at Venice, Alessandro 
Leopardi, the master of the standard-pedestals of the Piazza of S. 
Mark's. I do not mean these lists to be in any sense exhaustive, but 
simply to remind the reader of the rare and many-sided men of genius 
who devoted their abilities to this kind of work. Some of their master- 
pieces will be noticed in detail in the chapter on Sculpture. 

' Especially his work at Monte Oliveto, near Siena, and in the 



ARTS OF DECORATION. 79 

screens as guard the chapel of the Sacra Cintola at 
Prato. The Robbias prepare their deHcately-toned 
reliefs for the lunettes above the doorways. Model- 
ers in clay produce the terra-cotta work of the Cer- 
tosa, 01 the carola of angels who surround the little 
cupola behind the church of S. Eustorgio at Milan.^ 
Meanwhile mosaics are provided for the dome or 
let into the floor ;^ agates and marbles and lapis 
lazuli are pieced together for altar fronts and panel- 
ings ; ^ stalls are carved into fantastic patterns, and 
heavy roofs are embossed with figures of the saints 
and armorial emblems.* Tapestry is woven from 
the designs of excellent masters ; ^ great painters 

church of Monte Oliveto at Naples. The Sala del Cambio at Perugia 
may also be cited as rich in tarsia-work designed by Perugino, while the 
church of S. Pietro de' Cassinensi outside the city is a museum of 
masterpieces executed by Fra Damiano da Bergamo and Stefano da 
Bergamo from designs of Raphael. Not less beautiful are the inlaid 
wood panels in the Palace of Urbino, by Maestro Giacomo of Flor- 
ence. 

^ The churches and palaces of Lombardy are peculiarly rich in 
this kind of decoration. The fagade of the Oratory of S. Bernardino 
at Perugia, designed and executed by Agostino di Duccio, is a master- 
piece of rare beauty in this style. 

^ Not to mention the Renaissance mosaics of S. Mark's at Venice, 
the cupola of S. Maria del Popolo at Rome, executed in mosaic by 
Raphael, deserves special mention. A work illustrative of this cupola 
is one of Ludwig Griiner s best publications. 

^ South Italy and Florence are distinguished by two marked styles 
in this decoration of inlaid marbles or opera di commesso. Compare 
the Medicean chapel in S. Lorenzo, for instance, with the high altar of 
the cathedral of Messina. 

^ The roof of the Duomo at Volterra is a fine specimen. 

^ It will not be forgotten that Raphael's cartoons were made for 
tapestry. 



So RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

contribute arabesques of fresco or of stucco mixed 
with gilding, and glass is colored from the outlines 
of such draughtsmen as Ghiberti. 

Some of the decorative elements I have hastily 
enumerated will be treated in connection with the 
respective arts of sculpture and painting. The fact, 
meanwhile, deserves notice that they received a 
new development in relation to architecture during 
the first period of the Renaissance, and that they 
formed, as it were, an integral part of its main aesthet- 
ical purpose. Strip a chapel of the fifteenth cen- 
tury of ornamental adjuncts, and an uninteresting 
shell is left: what, for instance, would the fagades of 
the Certosa and the Cappella Colleoni be without 
their sculptured and inlaid marbles.? The genius 
of the age found scope in subordinate details, and 
the most successful architect was the man who com.- 
bined in himself a feeling for the capacities of the 
greatest number of associated arts. As the conse- 
quence of this profuse expenditure of loving care on 
every detail, the monuments of architecture belong- 
ing to the earlier Renaissance have a poetry that 
compensates for structural defects ; just as its wildest 
literary extravagances — the Hypnerotomachia Poli- 
phili, for instance — have a charm of wanton fancy 
and young joy that atones to sympathetic students 
for intolerable pedantries. 

In the second period the faults of the first group 



BRAMANTE, 8i 

of Renaissance builders were in a large measure 
overcome, and their striving after the production of 
new yet classic form was more completely realized. 
The reckless employment of luxuriant decoration 
yielded to a chastened taste, without the sacrifice of 
beauty or magnificence. Style was refined; the 
construction of large buildings was better under- 
stood, and the instinct for what lies within the 
means of a revived and secondary manner was more 
true. 

To Bramante must be assigned the foremost 
place among the architects of the golden age.^ 
Though little of his work survives entire and un- 
spoiled, it is clear that he exercised the profoundest 
influence over both successors and contemporaries. 
What they chiefly owed to him was the proper sub- 
ordination of beauty in details to the grandeur of 
simplicity and to unity of effect. He came at a 
moment when constructive problems had been 
solved, when mechanical means were perfected, and 
when the sister arts had reached their highest point. 
His early training in Lombardy accustomed him to 
the adoption of clustered piers instead of single 
columns, to semicircular apses and niches, and to 

' Bramante Lazzari was bom at Castel Durante, near Urbino, in 
1444. He spent the early years of his architect's life in Lombardy, in 
the service of Lodovico Sforza, and came probably to Rome upon his 
patron's downfall in 1499. 



82 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

the free use of minor cupolas — elements of design 
introduced neither by Brunelleschi nor by Albert! 
into the Renaissance style of Florence, but which 
were destined to determine the future of architec- 
ture for all Italy. Nature had gifted Bramante with 
calm judgment and refined taste ; his sense of the 
right limitations of the pseudo-Roman style was 
exquisite, and his feeling for structural symmetry- 
was just. If his manner strikes us as somewhat 
cold and abstract when compared with the more 
genial audacities of the earlier Renaissance, we must 
remember how salutary was the example of a 
rigorous and modest manner in an age which re- 
quired above all things to be preserved from its 
own luxuriant waywardness of fancy. It is hard to 
say how much of the work ascribed to Bramante in 
Northern Italy is genuine ; most of it, at any rate, 
belongs to the manner of his youth. The church of 
S. Maria della Consolazione at Todi, the palace of 
the Cancelleria at Rome, and the unfinished cathe- 
dral of Pavia enable us to comprehend the general 
character of this great architect's refined and noble 
manner. S. Peters, it may be said in passing, re- 
tains, in spite of all subsequent modifications, many 
essentially Bramantesque features — especially in the 
distribution of the piers and rounded niches. 

Bramante formed no school strictly so called, 
though his pupils, Cristoforo Rocchi and Ventura 



SCHOLARS Oh BRAMANTE, 83 

Vitoni, carried out his principles of building at Pavia 
and Pistoja. Vitoni's church of the Umilta in the 
latter city is a pure example of conscientious neo- 
Roman architecture. It consists of a large octagon 
surmounted by a dome and preceded by a lofty vaulted 
atrium or vestibule. The single round arch of this 
vestibule repeats the testudo of a Roman bath, and 
the decorative details are accurately reproduced from 
similar monuments. Unfortunately, Giorgio Vasari, 
who was employed to finish the cupola, spoiled its 
effect by raising it upon an ugly attic ; it is probable 
that the church, as designed by Vitoni, would have 
presented the appearance of a miniature Pantheon. 
At Rome the influence of Bramante was propagated 
through Raphael, Giulio Romano, and Baldassare 
Peruzzi. Raphael's claim to consideration as an 
architect rests upon the Palazzi Vidoni and Pandol- 
fini, the Capella Chigi in S. Maria del Popolo, and 
the Villa Madama. The last-named building, ex- 
ecuted by Giuho Romano after Raphael's design, is 
carried out in a style so forcible as to make us fancy 
that the pupil had a larger share in its creation than 
his teacher. These works, however, sink into insig- 
nificance before the Palazzo del Te at Mantua, the 
masterpiece of Giulio's genius. This most noble of 
Italian pleasure-houses remains to show what the 
imagination of a poet-artist could recover from the 
splendor of old Rome and adapt to the use of his 



84 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY, 

own age. The vaults of the Thermae of Titus, with 
their cameos of stucco and frescoed arabesques, are 
here repeated on a scale and with an exuberance of 
invention that surpass the model. Open loggie 
yield fair prospect over what were once trim gar- 
dens; spacious halls, adorned with frescoes in the 
vehement and gorgeous style of the Roman school, 
form a fit theater for the grand parade-life of an 
Italian prince. The whole is pagan in its pride and 
sensuality, its prodigality of strength, and insolence 
of freedom. Having seen this palace, we do not 
wonder that the fame of Giulio flew across the Alps 
and lived upon the lips of Shakspere: for in his 
master-work at Mantua he collected, as it were, and 
epitomized in one building all that inthralled the 
fancy of the Northern nations when they thought of 
Italy. 

A pendant to the Palazzo del Te is the Villa 
Famesina, raised on the banks of the Tiber by 
Baldassare Peruzzi for his fellow-townsman Agos- 
tino Chigi of Siena. It is an idyl placed beside a 
lyric ode, gentler and quieter in style, yet full of 
grace, breathing the large and liberal spirit of enjoy- 
ment that characterized the age of Leo. The fres- 
coes of Galatea and Psyche, executed by Raphael 
and his pupils, have made this villa famous in the 
annals of Italian painting. The memory of the 
Roman banker's splendid style of living mark it out 



SAN so VI NO. 8s 

as no less noteworthy in the history of Renaissance 
manners.^ 

Among the great edifices of this second period we 
may reckon Jacopo Sansovino's buildings at Venice, 
though they approximate rather to the style of the 
earlier Renaissance in all that concerns exuberance 
of decorative detail. The Venetians, somewhat 
behind the rest of Italy in the development of the 
fine arts, were at the height of prosperity and wealth 
during the middle period of the Renaissance ; and 
no city is more rich in monuments of the florid style. 
Something of their own delight in sensuous mag- 
nificence they communicated even to the foreigners 
who dwelt among them. The court of the Ducal 
Palace, the Scuola di S. Rocco, the Palazzo Comer, 
and the Palazzo Vendramini-Calergi, illustrate the- 
strong yet fanciful bravtcra style that pleased the aris- 
tocracy of Venice. Nowhere else does the architec- 
ture of the Middle Ages melt by more imperceptible 
degrees into that of the Revival, retaining through 
all changes the impress of a people splendor-loving 
in the highest sense. The Library of S. Mark, built 
by Sansovino in 1536, remains, however, the crown- 
ing triumph of Venetian art. It is impossible to 
contemplate its noble double row of open arches 
mthout feeling the eloquence of rhetoric so brilHant, 
fithout echoing the judgment of Palladio, that 

* See ' Age of the Despots,* p. 437. 



86 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

nothing more sumptuous or beautiful had been in-, 
vented since the age of ancient Rome. 

Time would fail to tell of all the architects 
who crowd the first half of the sixteenth century — 
of Antonio di San Gallo, famous for fortifications ; 
of Baccio d' Agnolo, who raised the Campanile of S. 
Spirito at Florence ; of Giovanni Maria Falconetto, 
to whose genius Padua owed so many princely edi- 
fices ; of Michele Sanmicheli, the military architect 
of Verona, and the builder of five mighty palaces 
for the nobles of his native city. Yet the greatest 
name of all this period can not be omitted : Michael 
Angelo must be added to the list of builders in the 
golden age. In architecture, as in sculpture, he not 
only bequeathed to posterity masterpieces of indi- 
vidual energy and original invention, in their kind 
unrivaled, but he also prepared for his successors 
a false way of working, and justified by his exam- 
ple the extravagances of the decadence. Without 
noticing the fagade designed for S. Lorenzo at 
Florence, the transformation of the Baths of Diocle- 
tian into a church, the remodeling of the Capitoline 
buildings, and the continuation of the Palazzo Far- 
nese — works that either exist only in drawings or have 
been confused by later alterations — it is enough here 
to mention the Sagrestia Nuova of S. Lorenzo and 
the cupola of S. Peter's. The sacristy may be 
looked on either as the masterpiece of a sculptor 



MICHAEL ANGELO. 87 

who required fit setting for his statues, or of an 
architect who designed statues to enhance the struc- 
ture he had planned. Both arts are used with equal 
ease, nor has the genius of Michael Angelo dealt 
more masterfully with the human frame than with 
the forms of Roman architecture in this chapel. He 
seems to have paid no heed to classic precedent, and 
to have taken no pains to adapt the parts to the 
structural purpose of the building. It was enough 
for him to create a wholly novel framework for the 
modern miracle of sculpture it enshrines, attending 
to such rules of composition as determine light and 
shade, and seeking by the slightness of moldings 
and pilasters to enhance the terrible and massive 
forms that brood above the Medicean tombs. The 
result is a product of picturesque and plastic art, as 
true to the Michaelangelesque spirit as the Temple 
of the Wingless Victory to that of Pheidias. But 
where Michael Angelo achieved a triumph of bold- 
ness, lesser natures were betrayed into bizarrerie ; 
and this chapel of the Medici, in spite of its gran- 
diose simplicity, proved a stumbHng-block to sub- 
sequent architects by encouraging them to despise 
propriety and violate the laws of structure. The 
same may be said with even greater truth of the 
Laurentian Library and its staircase. The false 
windows, repeated pillars, and barefaced aiming at 



88 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY, 

effect, that mark the insincerity of the barocco style, 
are found here almost for the first time. 

What S. Peter's would have been, if Michael 
Angelo had lived to finish it, can be imagined from 
his plans and elevations still preserved. It must 
always remain a matter of profound regret that 
his project was so far altered as to sacrifice the 
effect of the dome from the piazza. This dome 
is Michael Angelo's supreme' achievement as an 
architect. It not only preserves all that is majestic 
in the cupola of Brunelleschi, but it also avoids 
the defects of its avowed model, by securing the 
entrance of abundant light, and dilating the imagi- 
nation with the sense of space to soar and float 
in. It is the dome that makes S. Peter's what it 
is — the adequate symbol of the Church in an age 
that had abandoned medisevalism and produced a 
new type of civility for the modern nations. On 
the connection between the building of S. Peter's 
and the Reformation I have touched already.^ This 
mighty temple is the shrine of Catholicity, no longer 
cosmopolitan by right of spiritual empire, but secu- 
larized and limited to Latin races. At the same 
time it represents the spirit of a period when the 
Popes still led the world as intellectual chiefs. As the 
decree for its erection was the last act of the Papacy 

^ See ' Age of the Despots,' p. 439, See Gregorovius, ' Geschichte 
der Stadt Rom,' vol. viii. p. 127, and the quotation there translated 
from Pallavicini's ' History of the Council of Trent.' 



S. PETER'S. 89 

before the schism of the North had driven it into 
blind conflict with advancing culture, so S. Peter's 
remains the monument to after ages of a moment 
when the Roman Church, unterrified as yet by 
German rebels, dared to share the mundane im- 
pulse of the classical revival She had forgotten the 
catacombs, and ruthlessly destroyed the Basilica of 
Constantine. By rebuilding the mother-church of 
Western Christianity upon a new plan, she broke 
with tradition ; and if Rome has not ceased to 
be the Eternal City, if all ways are still leading to 
Rome, we may even hazard a conjecture that in 
the last days of their universal monarchy the Popes 
reared this fane to be the temple of a spirit alien 
to their own. It is at any rate certain that S. 
Peter's produces an impression less ecclesiastical, 
and less strictly Christian, than almost any of the 
elder and far humbler churches of Europe. Raised 
by proud and secular pontiffs in the heyday of re- 
nascent humanism, it seems to wait the time when 
the high-priests of a religion no longer hostile to 
science or antagonistic to the inevitable force of 
progress will chant their hymns beneath its spa- 
cious dome. 

The building of S. Peter's was so momentous 
in modern history, and so decisive for Italian archi- 
tecture, that it may be permitted me to describe 
the vicissitudes through which the structure passed 



90 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

before receiving completion. Nicholas V., founder 
of the secular papacy and chief patron of the hu- 
manistic movement in Rome, had approved a 
scheme for thoroughly rebuilding and refortifying 
the pontifical city.^ Part of this plan involved the 
reconstruction of S. Peter's. The old basilica was 
to be removed, and on its site was to rise a mighty 
church, shaped like a Latin cross, with a central 
dome and two high towers flanking the vestibule, 
Nicholas died before his project could be carried 
into effect. Beyond destroying the old temple of 
Probus and marking out foundations for the trib- 
une of the new church, nothing had been accom- 
plished ; ^ nor did his successors until the reign of 
Julius think of continuing what he had begun. In 
1506, on the 1 8th of April, Julius laid the first 
stone of S. Peter's according to the plans provided 
by Bramante. The basilica was designed in the 
shape of a Greek cross, surmounted by a colossal 
dome, and approached by a vestibule fronted with six 
columns. As in all the works of Bramante, sim- 
plicity and dignity distinguished this first scheme.^ 

^ See ' Age of the Despots,' pp. 378-380. ' Revival of Learning,' 
pp. 224-229. For his architectural designs see his life, by Manetti, 
book ii., in Muratori, vol. iii. part ii. 

"^ Gregorovius, vol. vii. p. 638. 

' Besides the great work of Bonanni, ' Templi Vaticani Historia/ I 
may refer my readers to the atlas volume of 'Illustrations, Architec- 
tural and Pictorial, of the Genius of Michael Angelo Buonarroti,' com- 
piled by Mr. Harford (Colnaghi, 1857). Plates i to 7 of that work are 



ARCHITECTS OF S. PETER'S, 91 

For eight years, until his death in 1514, Bramante 
labored on the building. Julius, the most im- 
patient of masters, urged him to work rapidly. 
In consequence of this haste, the substructures of the 
new church proved insecure, and the huge piers 
raised to support the cupola were imperfect, while 
the venerable monuments contained in the old church 
were ruthlessly destroyed.^ After Bramante's death 
Giuliano di S. Gallo, Fra Giocondo, and Raphael 
successively superintended the construction, each 
for a short period. Raphael, under Leo X., was 
appointed sole architect, and went so far as to alter 
the design of Bramante by substituting the Latin 
for the Greek cross. Upon his death, Baldassare 
Peruzzi continued the work, and supplied a series 
of new designs, restoring the ground-plan of the 
church to its original shape. He was succeeded 
in the reign of Paul III. by Antonio di S. Gallo, 
who once more reverted to the Latin cross, and 
proposed a novel form of cupola with flanking 
towers for the fagade, of bizarre more than beautiful 
proportions. After a short interregnum, during 
which Giulio Romano superintended the building 

devoted to the plans of S. Peter's. Plate 4 is specially interesting, 
since it represents in one view the old basilica and the design ot 
Bramante, together with those of Antonio di S. Gallo and Michael 
Angelo. 

^ The subterranean vaults of S. Peter's contain mere fragments of 
tombs, some precious as historical records, some valuable as works of 
art, swept together pell-mell from the ruins of the old basilica. 



92 RENAISSANCE IN ITAL F. 

and did nothing remarkable, Michael Angelo was 
called in 1535 to undertake the sole charge of the 
edifice. He declared that wherever subsequent 
architects had departed from Bramante's project, 
they had erred. * It is impossible to deny that 
Bramante was as great in architecture as any man 
has been since the days of the ancients. When 
he first laid the plan of S. Peter's, he made it not 
a mass of confusion, but clear and simple, well 
lighted, and so thoroughly detached that it in no 
way interfered with any portion of the palace.'^ 
Having thus pronounced himself in general for 
Bramante's scheme, Michael Angelo proceeded to 
develop it in accordance with his own canons oj 
taste. He retained the Greek cross ; but the dome, 
as he conceived it, and the details designed for 
each section of the building, differed essentially 
from what the earlier master would have sanctioned. 
Not the placid and pure taste of Bramante, but the 
masterful and fiery genius of Buonarroti is respon- 
sible for the colossal scale of the subordinate parts 
and variously broken lineaments of the existing 
church. In spite of all changes of direction, the 
fabric of S. Peter's had been steadily advancing. 
Michael Angelo was, therefore, able to raise the 
central structure as far as the drum of the cupola 

* See the original letter to Ammanati, published from the Archivio 
Buonarroti, by Signer Milanesi, p. 535. 



COMPLETION OF S. PETER'S. 93 

before his death. His plans and models were care- 
fully preserved, and a special papal ordinance de- 
creed that henceforth there should be no deviation 
from the scheme he had laid down. Unhappily 
this rule was not observed. Under Pius V., Vig- 
nola and Piero Ligorio did indeed continue his 
tradition ; under Gregory XI 1 1., Sixtus V., and 
Clement VI 1 1., Giacomo della Porta made no sub- 
stantial alterations; and in 1590, Domenico Fon- 
tana finished the dome. But during the pontificate 
of Paul v., Carlo Maderno resumed the form of 
the Latin cross, and completed the nave and vesti- 
bule, as they now stand, upon this altered plan 
(16 1 4). The consequence is what has been already 
noted — at a moderate distance from the church 
the dome is lost to view; it only takes its true 
position of predominance when seen from afar. In 
the year 1626, S. Peter's was consecrated by 
Urban VIII., and the mighty work was finished. 
It remained for Bernini to add the colonnades 
of the piazza, no less picturesque in their effect 
than admirably fitted for the pageantry of world- 
important ceremonial. At the end of the eighteenth 
century it was reckoned that the church had cost 
but little less than fifty million scudi. 

Michael Angelo forms the link between the 
second and third periods of the Renaissance. Among 
the architects of the latter age we have to reckon 



94 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

those who based their practice upon minute stud)) 
of antique writers, and who, more than any of then 
predecessors, reaHzed the long-sought restitution o\ 
the classic style according to precise scholastic 
canons.^ A new age had now begun for Italy. 
The glory and the grace of the Renaissance, its 
blooming time of beauty, and its springtide of young 
strength, were over. Strangers held the reins of 
power, and the Reformation had begun to make 
itself felt in the Northern provinces of Christendom. 
A colder and more formal spirit everywhere pre- 
vailed. The sources of invention in the art of 
painting were dried up. Scholarship had pined 
away into pedantic purism. Correct taste was 
coming to be prized more highly than originality of 
genius in literature. Nor did architecture fail to 
manifest the operation of this change. The greatest 
builder of the period was Andrea Palladio of Vi- 
cenza, who combined a more complete analytical 
knowledge of antiquity with a firmer adherence to 
rule and precedent than even the most imitative of 
his forerunners. It is useless to seek for decorative 
fancy, wealth of detail, or sallies of inventive genius 
in the Palladian style. All is cold and calculated in 

^ I am far from meaning that the earlier architects had not been 
guided by ancient authors. Alberti's ' Treatise on the Art of Building' 
is a sufficient proof of their study of Vitruvius, and we know that 
Fabio Calvi translated that writer into Italian for Raphael. In the 
later Renaissance this study passed into purism. 



PALLADTO, 95 

the many palaces and churches of this master which 
adorn both Venice and Vicenza ; they make us feel 
that creative inspiration has been superseded by the 
labor of the calculating reason. One great public 
building of Palladio's, however — the Palazzo della 
Ragione at Vicenza — may be cited as, perhaps, the 
culminating point of pure Renaissance architecture. 
In its simple and heroical arcades, its solid columns, 
and noble open spaces, the strength of Rome is 
realized to the eyes of those who do not pene- 
trate too far inside the building.^ Here, and here 
only, the architectural problem of the epoch — 
how to bring the art of the ancients back to life and 
use again — was solved according to the spirit and 
the letter of the past. Palladio never equaled this, 
the earliest of all his many works. 

In the first half of the sixteenth century the 
dictatorship of art had been already transferred from 
Florence and Rome to Lombardy.^ The painters 
who carried on the great traditions were Venetian. 
Among the architects, Palladio was a native of 
Vicenza ; Giacomo Barozzi, the author of the * Trea- 
tise on the Orders,* took the name by which he is 
known from his birthplace, Vignola ; Vincenzo Sea- 

* It must be confessed that this grandiose and picturesque struc- 
ture is but a shell to mask an earlier Gothic edifice. 

''■ Compare ' Revival of Learning/ p. 506, for the same transfer 
ence ot power in literature from Centra* to Northern Itab' at this 
Uixie. 



96 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

mozzi was a fellow-townsman of Palladio ; Galeazzo 
Alessi, though born at Perugia, spent his life and 
developed his talents in Genoa ; Andrea Formigine, 
the palace-builder, was a Bolognese ; Bartolommeo 
Ammanati alone at Florence exercised the arts of 
sculpture and architecture in their old conjunction. 
Vignola, Palladio's elder by a few years, displays in 
his work even more of the scholastically frigid spirit 
of the late Renaissance, the narrowing of poetic 
impulse, and the dwindling of vitality, that sadden 
the second half of the sixteenth century in Italy. 
Scamozzi, laboring at Venice on works that San- 
sovino left unfinished, caught the genial spirit of the 
old Venetian style. Alessi, in like manner, at Genoa, 
felt the influences of a rich and splendor-loving 
aristocracy. His church of S. Maria di Carignano 
is one of the most successful ecclesiastical buildings 
of the late Renaissance, combining the principles of 
Bramante and Michael Angelo in close imitation of 
S. Peter's, and adhering in detail to the canons of 
the new taste. 

These canons were based upon a close study of 
Vitruvius. Palladio, Vignola, and Scamozzi were no 
less ambitious as authors than as architects ; ^ their 

Palladio's 'Four Books of Architecture/ first published at Venice 
m 1570, and Vig-nola's 'Treatise on the Five Orders* have been trans- 
lated into all the modern languages. Scamozzi projected, and partly 
tinished, a comprehensive work on ' Universal Architecture,* which 
ivas printed in 1685 at Venice. 



THE PALLADIAN STYLE. 97 

minute analysis of antique treatises on the art of 
construction led to the formation of exact rules for 
the treatment of the five classic orders, the propor- 
tions of the chief parts used in building, and the 
correct method of designing theaters and palaces 
church-fronts and cupolas. Thus architecture in its 
third Renaissance period passed into scholasticism. 

The masters of this age, chiefly through the 
weight of their authority as writers, exercised a 
wider European influence than any of their pre- 
decessors. We English, for example, have given 
Palladio's name to the Italian style adopted by us 
in the seventeenth century. This selection of one 
man to represent an epoch was due partly no doubt 
to the prestige of Palladio's great buildings in the 
South, but more, I think, to the facihty with which 
his principles could be assimilated. Depending but 
little for effect upon the arts of decoration, his style 
was easily imitated in countries where painting and 
sculpture were unknown, and where a genius like 
Jean Goujon, the Sansovino of the French, has 
never been developed. To have rivaled the fagade 
of the Certosa would have been impossible in 
London. Yet here Wren produced a cathedral 
worthy of comparison with the proudest of the late 
Italian edifices. Moreover, the principles of taste 
that governed Europe in the seventeenth century 
were such as found fitter architectural expression in 



98 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

this Style than in the more genial and capricious 
manner of the earlier periods. 

After reviewing the rise and development oi 
Renaissance architecture, it is almost irresistible to 
compare the process whereby the builders of this 
age learned to use dead forms for the expression of 
their thoughts, with the similar process by which the 
scholars accustomed themselves to Latin meters and 
the cadences of Ciceronian periods.^ The object in 
each case was the same— to be as true to the antique 
as possible, and without actually sacrificing the inde- 
pendence of the modern mind, to impose upon it the 
limitations of a bygone civilization. At first the 
enthusiasm for antiquity inspired architects and 
scholars alike with a desire to imitate per saltum, 
and many works of fervid sympathy and pure artistic 
intuition were produced. In course of time the laws 
both of language and construction were more accu- 
rately studied ; invention was superseded by ped- 
antry; after Poliziano and Alberti came Bembo 
and Palladio. In proportion as architects learned 
more about Vitruvius, and scholars narrowed their 
taste to Virgil, the style of both became more 
cramped and formal. It ceased at last to be possible 
to express modern ideas freely in the correct Latinity 
required by cultivated ears, while no room for origi- 
nality, no scope for poetry of invention, remained in 

* See 'Revival of Learning,' chap. viii. 



NEO-ROMAN STYLE. 99 

the elaborated method of the architects. Neo-Latin 
literature dwindled away to nothing, and Palladio 
was followed by the violent reactionaries of the 
barocco mannerism. 

In one all-important respect this parallel breaks 
down. While the labors of the Latinists subserved 
the simple process of instruction, by purifying literary 
taste and familiarizing the modern mind with the 
masterpieces of the classic authors, the architects 
created a\iew common style for Europe. With all 
its defects, it is not Hkely that the neo-Roman archi- 
tecture, so profoundly studied by the Italians, and 
so anxiously refined by their chief masters, will ever 
wholly cease to be employed. In all cases where a 
grand and massive edifice, no less suited to purposes 
of practical utility than imposing by its splendor, is 
required, this style of building will be found the best. 
Changes of taste and fashion, local circumstances, 
and the personal proclivities of modern architects may 
determine the choice of one type rather than another 
among the numerous examples furnished by Italian 
masters. But it is not possible that either Greek or 
Gothic should permanently take the place assigned 
to neo-Roman architecture in the public buildings of 
European capitals. 



CHAPTER III. 

SCULPTURE. 

Niccola Pisano — Obscurity of the sources for a History of Early Italian 
Sculpture — Vasari's Legend of Pisano — Deposition from the Cross 
at Lucca — Study of Nature and the Antique — Sarcophagus at Pisa 
— Pisan Pulpit — Niccola's School — Giovanni Pisano — Pulpit in S. 
Andrea at Pistoja — Fragments of his work at Pisa — Tomb of Ben- 
edict XL at Perugia — Bass-reliefs at Orvieto — Andrea Pisano — 
Relation of Sculpture to Painting — Giotto — Subordination of Sculp- 
ture to Architecture in Italy — Pisano's Influence in Venice — Bal- 
duccio of Pisa — Orcagna— The Tabernacle of Orsammichele — The 
Gates of the Florentine Baptistery — Competition of Ghiberti, Bru- 
nelleschi, and Delia Querela — Comparison of Ghiberti's and Brunel- 
leschi's Trial-pieces — Comparison of Ghiberti and Delia Ouercia — 
The Bass-reliefs of S. Petronio — Ghiberti's Education — His Picto- 
rial Style in Bass-relief— His feeling for the Antique — Donatello — 
Early Visit to Rome — Christian subjects — Realistic Treatment — S. 
George and David — Judith — Equestrian Statue of Gattamelata— 
Influence of Donatello 's Naturalism — Andrea Verocchio — His 
David — Statue of Colleoni — Alessandro Leopardi — Lionardo's 
Statue of Francesco Sforza — The Pollajuoli — Tombs of Sixtus IV. 
and Innocent VIII. — Luca della Robbia — His Treatment of Glazed 
Earthenware — Agostino di Duccio — The Oratory of S. Bernardino 
at Perugia — Antonio Rossellino — Matteo Civitali — Mino da Fiesole 
— Benedetto da Majano — Characteristics and Masterpieces of this 
Group — Sepulchral Monuments — Andrea Contucci's Tombs in S. 
Maria del Popolo — Desiderio da Settignano — Sculpture in S. Fran- 
cesco at Rimini — Venetian Sculpture — Verona — Guido Mazzoni of 
Modena — Certosa of Pavia — Colleoni Chapel at Bergamo — Sanso- 
vino at Venice — Pagan Sculpture— Michael Angelo's Scholars — 
Baccio Bandinelli — Bartolommeo Ammanati — Cellini — Gian Bo- 
logna — Survey of the History of Renaissance Sculpture. 

In the procession of the fine arts sculpture always 
follows close upon the steps of architecture, and at 



NICCOLA PISANO. loi 

first appears in some sense as her handmaid. Me- 
diaeval Italy found her Pheidias in a great man of 
Pisan origin, born during the first decade of the 
thirteenth century. It was Niccola Pisano, architect 
and sculptor, who first breathed with the breath of 
genius life into the dead forms of plastic art. From 
him we date the dawn of the aesthetical Renaissance 
with the same certainty as from Petrarch that of hu- 
manism ; for he determined the direction not only of 
sculpture but also of painting in Italy. To quote 
the language of Lord Lindsay's panegyric : ' Neither 
Dante nor Shakspere can boast such extent and 
durability of influence; for whatever of highest 
excellence has been achieved in sculpture and paint- 
ing, not in Italy only but throughout Europe, has 
been in obedience to the impulse he primarily gave, 
and in following up the principle which he first 
struck out' ^ In truth Niccola Pisano put the 
artist on the right track of combining the study of 
antiquity with the study of nature ; and to him be- 
longs the credit not merely of his own achievement, 
considerable as that may be, but also of the work of 
his immediate scholars and of all who learned from 
him to portray life. From Niccola Pisano onward 
to Michael Angelo and Cellini we trace one gene- 
alogy of sculptors, who, though they carried art 
beyond the sphere of his invention, looked back to 

* * Sketches of the History of Christian Art,' vol. ii. p. 102, 



102 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

him as their progenitor. The man who first eman- 
cipated sculpture from servile bondage, and opened 
a way for the attainment of true beauty, would by 
the Greeks have been honored with a special cultus 
as the Hero Eponym of art. It remains for us 
after our own fashion to pay some such homage to 
Pisano. 

The chief difficulty with which the student of 
early art and literature has to deal is the insuffi- 
ciency of positive information. Instead of accurate 
dates and well-established facts, he finds a legend, 
rich apparently in detail, but liable at every point 
to doubt, and subject to attack by plausible conjec- 
ture. In the absence of contemporary documents 
and other trustworthy sources of instruction, he is 
tempted to substitute his own hypotheses for tradi- 
tion and to reconstruct the faulty outlines of for- 
gotten history according to his own ideas of fitness. 
The Germans have been our masters in this species 
of destructive, dubitative, restorative criticism ; and 
it is undoubtedly flattering to the historian's vanity 
to constitute himself a judge and arbiter in cases where 
tact and ingenuity may claim to sift the scattered 
fragments of confused narration. Yet to resist this 
temptation is in many cases a plain and simple duty. 
Tradition, when not positively disproved, should be 
allowed to have its full value ; and a sounder historic 
sense is exercised in adopting its testimony with due 



THE LEGEND OF NICCOLA. 103 

caution than in recklessly rejecting it and substi- 
tuting guesses which the lack of knowledge renders 
unsubstantial. Tradition may err about dates, de- 
tails, and names. It is just here that antiquarian 
research can render valuable help. But there are 
occasions when the perusal of documents and the 
exercise of what is called the higher criticism afford 
no surer basis for opinion. If in such cases a legend 
has been formed and recorded, the student will ad- 
vance further toward comprehending the spirit of 
his subject by patiently considering what he knows 
to be in part perhaps a mythus than by starting 
with the foregone conclusion that the legend must of 
necessity be worthless, and that his cunning will 
suffice to supply the missing clue. ^ 

Thus much I have said by way of preface to 
what follows upon Niccola Pisano. Almost all we 
know about him is derived from a couple of inscrip- 
tions, a few contracts, and his life by Giorgio Vasari. 
It is clear that Vasari often wrote with careless- 
ness, confusing dates and places, and taking no 

* Since I wrote the paragraph above, I have chanced to read Mr. 
Ruskin's eloquent tirade against the modern skeptical school of critics 
in his 'Mornings in Florence,' 'The Vaulted Book,' pp. 105, 106. 
With the spirit of it I thoroughly agree ; feeling that, in the absence of 
solid evidence to the contrary, I would always rather accept sixteenth- 
century Italian tradition with Vasari than reject it with German or 
English speculators of to-day. This does not mean that I wish to 
swear by Vasari, when he can be proved to have been wrong, but 
that I regard the present tendency to mistrust tradition, only because 
it is tradition, as in the highest sense uncritical. 



I04 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY, 

pains to verify the truth of his assertions. Much 
of Niccola's biography reads Hke a legend in his 
pages — the popular and oral tradition of a great 
man, whose panegyric it was more easy in the 
sixteenth century to adorn with rhetoric than to 
chronicle the details of his life with scrupulous 
fidelity. A well-founded conviction of Vasari's fre- 
quent inaccuracy has induced recent critics to call in 
question many hitherto accepted points about the 
nationality and training of Pisano. The discussion 
of their arguments I leave for the appendix, con- 
tenting myself at present with relating so much of 
Vasari's legend as can not, I think, reasonably be 
rejected.* 

Before the sculptor appeared in Niccola Pisano, 
he was already a famous architect ; and it must 
always be remembered that he and his school 
subordinated the plastic to the constructive arts. 
It was not until the year 1233, or 1237, according 
to different modern calculations, that he executed 
his first masterpiece in sculpture.^ This was a 
Deposition from the Cross, in high relief, placed 

* See Appendix I., on the Pulpits of Pisa and Ravello. 

" The date is extremely doubtful. Were we to trust internal evi- 
dence — the evidence of style and handling — we should be inclined to 
name this not the earliest but the latest and ripest of Pisano's works. 
It may be suggested in passing that the form of the lunette was favor- 
able to the composition by forcing a grao-'Uion in the figures from the 
center to either side. There is an engraving of this bass-relief in 
Ottley's 'Italian School of Design.' 



DECAY OF CLASSICAL SCULPTURE. 105 

in a lunette over one of the side doors of S. Martino 
at Lucca. The noble forms of this group, the large- 
ness of its style, the breadth of drapery and free- 
dom of action it displays, but, above all, the unity 
of its design, proclaimed that a new era had begun 
for art. In order to appreciate the importance of 
this relief, it is only necessary to compare it with 
the processional treatment of similar subjects upon 
early Christian sarcophagi, where each figure stands 
up stiff and separate, nor can the controlling and 
combining arti^'s thought be traced in any effort 
after composition. Ever since the silver age of 
Hadrian, when a Bithynian slave by his beauty 
gave a final impulse to the genius of Greece, sculp- 
ture had been gradually declining until nothing was 
left but a formal repetition of conventional outlines. 
The so-called Romanesque and Byzantine styles 
were but the dotage of second childhood, fumbling 
with the methods and materials of an irrecoverable 
past. It is true, indeed, that unknown mediaeval 
carvers had shown an instinct for the beautiful as well 
as great fertility of grotesque invention. The fagades 
of Lombard churches are covered with fanciful and 
sometimes forcibly dramatic groups of animals and 
men in combat; and contemporaneously with Nic- 
cola Pisano, many Gothic sculptors of the North 
were adorning the fagades and porches of cathe- 
drals with statuary unrivaled in one style of love- 



io6 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

liness.^ Yet the founder of a line of progressive 
artists had not arisen, and, except in Italy, the con- 
ditions were still wanting under which alone the 
plastic arts could attain to independence. A fresh 
start, at once conscious and scientific, was impera- 
tively demanded. This new beginning sculpture took 
in the brain of Niccola Pisano, who returned from 
the by-paths of his predecessors to the free field 
of nature, and who learned precious lessons from 
the fragments of classical sculpture existing in his 
native town. As though to prove the essential 
dependence of the modern revival upon the recovery 
of antique culture, we find that his genius, in spite 
of its powerful originality and profoundly Christian 
bias, required the confirmation which could only 
be derived from Graeco-Roman precedent. In the 
Campo Santo at Pisa may still be seen a sar- 
cophagus representing the story of Hippolytus and 
Phaedra, where once reposed the dust of Beatrice, 
the mother of the pious Countess Matilda of Tus- 
cany. Studying the heroic nudities and noble atti- 
tudes of this bass-relief, Niccola rediscovered the 
right way of art — not by merely copying his model, 
but by divining the secret of the grand style. His 
work at Pisa contains abundant evidence that, 
while he could not wholly free himself from the 

' Rheims Cathedral, for example, was begun in 121 1. Upon its 
western portals is the loveliest of Northern Gothic sculpture. 



THE PIS AN PULPIT, 107 

defects of the later Romanesque manner, betrayed 
by his choice of short and square-set types, he 
nevertheless learned from the antique how to aim 
at beauty and freedom in his imitation of the 
living human form. A marble vase, sculptured 
with Indian Bacchus and his train of Maenads, 
gave him further help. From these grave or grace- 
ful classic forms, satisfied with their own goodliness, 
and void of inner symbohsm, the Christian sculptor 
drank the inspiration of Renaissance art. In the 
Adoration of the Magi, carved upon his Pisan 
pulpit. Madonna assumes the haughty pose of The- 
seus' wife ; while the high-priest, in the Circum- 
cision, displays the majesty of Dionysus leaning 
on the neck of Ampelus. Nor again is the naked 
vigor of Hippolytus without its echo in the figure 
of the young man — Hercules or Fortitude — upon 
a bracket of the same pulpit. These sculptures of 
Pisano are thus for us a symbol of what happened 
in the age of the Revival. The old world and 
the new shook hands ; Christianity and Hellenism 
kissed each other. And yet they still remained 
antagonistic — fused externally by art, but severed 
in the consciousness that, during those strange 
years of dubious impulse, felt the might of both. 
Monks leaning from Pisano's pulpit preached the 
sinfulness of natural pleasure to women whose eyes 
were fixed on the adolescent beauty of an athlete. 



io8 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

Not far off was the time when Filarete should cast in 
bronze the legends of Ganymede and Leda for the 
portals of S. Peter's, when Raphael should mingle a 
carnival of more than pagan sensuality with Bible 
subjects in Leo*s Loggie, when Guglielmo della Porta 
should place the naked portrait of Giulia Bella in 
marble at the feet of Paul III. upon his sepulchre.^ 
Niccola, meanwhile, did not follow his Roman 
models in any slavish spirit. They were neither 
numerous nor excelknt enough to compel blind 
imitation or to paralyze inventive impulse. The 
thoughts to be expressed in marble by the first 
modern artist were not Greek. This in itself saved 
him from that tendency to idle reproduction which 
proved the ruin of the later neo-pagan sculptors. 
Yet the fragments of antique work he found within 

^ Antonio Filarete was commissioned, soon after 143 1, by Euge- 
nius IV., to make the great gates of S. Peter's. The decorative frame- 
work represents a multitude of living creatures — snails, snakes, lizards, 
mice, butterflies, and birds — half hidden in foliage, together with the 
best known among Greek myths, the Rape of Proserpine, Dian?i and 
Actseon, Europa and the Bull, the Labors of Hercules, etc. Such 
fables as the Fox and the Stork, the Fox and the Crow, and old stories 
like that of the death of ^'Eschylus, are included in this medley. The 
monument of Paul III. is placed in the choir of S. Peter's. Criulia 
Bella was the mistress of Alexander VI., and a sister of the Famese, 
who owed his cardinal's hat to her influence. To represent her as an 
allegory of Truth upon her brother's tomb might well pass for a grim 
satire. The Prudence opposite is said to be a portrait of the Pope's 
mother, Giovanna Gaetani. She resembles nothing more than a duenna 
of the type of Martha in Goethe's ' Faust.' Here, again, the allegory 
would point a scathing sarcasm, if we did not remember the naivete 
of the Renaissance. 



mCCOLA'S STYLE. 109 

his reach, helped him to struggle after a higher 
quality of style, and established standards of suc- 
cessful treatment. For the rest, his choice of form 
and the proportions of his figures show that Niccola 
resorted to native Tuscan models. If nothing of 
his handiwork were left but the bass-relief of the 
Inferno on the Pisan pulpit, the torsos of the men 
struggling with demons in that composition would 
prove this point. It remains his crowning merit 
to have first expressed the mythology of Chris- 
tianity and the sentiment of the Middle Ages with 
the conscious aim of a real artist. And here it may 
be noticed that, a true Italian, he infused but little 
of intense or mystical emotion into his art. Nic- 
cola is more of a humanist, if this word may be 
applied to a sculptor, than some of his immediate 
successors. The hexagonal pulpit in the Baptistery 
of Pisa, the octagonal pulpit in the cathedral of 
Siena, the fountain in the market-place of Perugia, 
and the shrine of S. Dominic at Bologna, all of 
them designed and partly finished between 1260 
and 1274 by Niccola and his scholars, display his 
mastery over the art of sculpture in the maturity 
of his genius. So highly did the Pisans prize their 
fellow-townsman's pulpit that a law was passed and 
guardians were appointed for its preservation — 
much in the same way as the Zeus of Phidias was 
consigned to the care of the Phaidruntai. 



no RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

Niccola Pisano founded a school. His son Gio- 
vanni, and the numerous pupils employed upon the 
monuments just mentioned at Siena, Bologna, and 
Perugia, carried on the tradition of their master, and 
spread his style abroad through Italy. Giovanni 
Pisano, to whom we owe the Spina Chapel and the 
Campo Santo at Pisa, the fagade of the Sienese 
Duomo, and the altar-shrine of S. Donato at Arezzo 
— four of the purest works of Gothic art in Italy — 
showed a very decided leaning to the vehement and 
mystic style of the Transalpine sculptors. We trace 
a dramatic intensity in Giovanni's work, not derived 
from his father, not caught from study of the an- 
tique, and curiously blended with the general char- 
acteristics of the Pisan school. In spite of the 
Gothic cusps introduced by Niccola into his pulpits, 
the spirit of his work remained classical. The 
young Hercules holding the lion's cub in his right 
hand upon his shoulder, while with his left he tames 
the raging lioness, has the true Italian instinct for a 
return to Latin style. The same sympathy with 
the past is observable in the self-restraint and com- 
parative coldness of the bass-reliefs at Pisa. The Ju- 
nonian attitude of Madonna, the senatorial dignity of 
Simeon, the ponderous folding of the drapery, and 
the massive carriage of the neck throughout denote 
an effort to revivify an antique manner. What, 
therefore, Niccola effected for sculpture was a class- 



GIOVANNI PISANO. in 

ical revival in the very depth of the Middle Ages. 
The case is different with his son Giovanni. Profiting 
by the labors of his father, and following in his foot- 
steps, he carried the new art into another region, 
and brought a genius of more picturesque and forci- 
ble temper into play. The value of this new di- 
rection given to sculpture for the arts of Italy, espe- 
cially for painting, can not be exaggerated. Without 
Giovanni's intervention, the achievement of Niccola 
might possibly have been as unproductive of im- 
mediate results as the Tuscan Romanesque, that 
mediaeval effort after the Renaissance, was in archi- 
tecture.^ 

The Gothic element, so cautiously adopted by 
Niccola, is used with sympathy and freedom by his 
son, whose masterpiece, the pulpit of S. Andrea at 
Pistoja, might be selected as the supreme triumph 
of Italian Gothic sculpture. The superiority of 
that complex and consummate work of plastic art 
over the pulpit of the Pisan Baptistery, in all the 
most important qualities of style and composition, 
can scarcely be called in question. Its only serious 
fault is an exaggeration of the height of the pillars 
in proportion to the size of the hexagon they 
support. Like the pulpits of the Baptistery, of the 
Duomo of Pisa, and of the Duomo of Siena, it 
combines bass-reliefs and detached statues, carved 

* See above, p. 49. 



112 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

capitals, and sculptured lions, in a maze of mar- 
velous invention ; but it has no rival in the archi- 
tectonic effect of harmony, and the masterly feeling 
for balanced masses it displays. The five sub- 
jects chosen by Giovanni for his bass-reliefs are the 
Nativity, the Adoration of the Magi, the Mas- 
sacre of the Innocents, the Crucifixion, and the Last 
Judgment, In the Nativity our Lady is no longer 
the Roman matron of Niccola's conception, but 
a graceful mother, young in years, and bending 
with the weakness of childbirth. Her attitude, ex- 
quisite by the suggestion of tenderness and deli- 
cacy, is one that often reappears in the later work 
of the Pisan school — for example, in the rough 
abozzamento in the Campo Santo at Pisa, above 
the north door of the Duomo at Lucca, and at Or- 
vieto on the fagade of the cathedral ; but it has no- 
where else been treated with the same sense of 
beauty. The Massacre of the Innocents, compared 
with this relief, is a tragedy beside an idyl. Here 
the whole force of Giovanni's eminently dramatic 
genius comes into full play. Not only has he treated 
the usual incidents of mothers struggling with sol- 
diers and bewailing their dead darlings, but he has 
also introduced a motive, which might well have 
been used by subsequent artists in dealing with 
the same subjects. Herod is throned in one corner 
of the composition ; before him stand a group of 



PULPIT AT PISTOJA, 113 

men and women, some imploring the tyrant for 
mercy, some defying him in impotent despair, and 
some invoking the curse of God upon his head. In 
the Adoration of the Magi, again, Giovanni shows 
originaHty by the double action he has chosen to 
develop. On one side the kings are sleeping, while 
an angel comes to wake them, pointing out the star. 
On the other side they fall at the feet of the Ma- 
donna. It will be gathered even from these bare 
descriptions that Giovanni introduced a stir of life 
and movement, and felt his subjects with a poetic 
intensity, alien to the ideal of Grseco- Roman sculp- 
ture. He effected a fusion between the grand style 
revived by Niccola and the romantic fervor of the 
modern imagination. It was in this way that the 
tradition handed down by him proved inestimably 
serviceable to the painters. 

The bass-reliefs, however, by no means form the 
chief attraction of this pulpit. At each of its six 
angles stand saints, evangelists, and angels, whose 
symbolism it is not now so easy to decipher. The 
most beautiful groups are a company of angels blow- 
ing the judgment trumpets, and a winged youth 
standing above a winged lion and bull. These 
groups separate the several compartments of the 
bass-reliefs, and help to form the body of the pulpit. 
Beneath, on capitals of the supporting pillars, stand 
the Sibyls, each with her attendant genius, while 



114 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

prophets lean or crouch within the spandrels of the 
arches. Thus every portion of this master-work is 
crowded with figures — some detached, some executed 
in rehef ; and yet, amid so great a multitude, the eye 
is not confused ; the total effect is nowhere dissipated. 
The whole seems governed by one constructive 
thought, projected as a perfect unity of composition.^ 
A later work of Giovanni Pisano was the pulpit 
executed for the cathedral of Pisa, now unfortu- 
nately broken up. An interesting fragment, one of 
the supporting columns of the octagon which formed 
the body of this structure, still exists in the museum 
of the Campo Santo. It is an allegorical statue of 
Pisa. The Ghibelline city is personified as a crowned 
woman, suckling children at her breast, and stand- 
ing on a pedestal supported by the eagle of the 
Empire. She wears a girdle of rope seven times 
knotted, to betoken the rule of Pisa over seven sub- 
ject islands. At the four corners of her throne 
stand the four human virtues. Prudence, Temper- 
ance, Justice, and Fortitude, distinguished less by 
beauty of shape than by determined energy of sym- 
bolism. Temperance is a naked woman, with hair 
twisted in the knots and curls of a Greek Aphro- 
dite. Justice is old and wrinkled, clothed with mas- 

^ Having said so much about this pulpit of S. Andrea, I am sorry 
that I can not refer the English reader to any accessible representation 
of it. For its sake alone, if for no other purpose, Pistoja is well worth 
a visit. 



TOMB OF BENEDICT XL 115 

sive drapery, and holding in her hand the scales. 
Throughout this group there is no attempt to realize 
forms pleasing to the eye ; the sculptor has aimed at 
suggesting to the mind as many points of intellec- 
tual significance as possible. In spite of ugliness 
and hardness, the Allegory of Pisa commands re- 
spect by vigor of conception, and rivets attention 
by force of execution. 

A more popular and pleasing monument by Gio- 
vanni Pisano is the tomb of Benedict XI. in the 
church of S. Domenico at Perugia. The Pope, whose 
life was so obnoxious to the ambition of Phihp le 
Bel that his timely death aroused suspicion of poison, 
lies asleep upon his marble bier with hands crossed in 
an attitude of peaceful expectation.^ At his head 
and feet stand angels drawing back the curtains that 
would else have shrouded this last slumber of a good 
man from the eyes of the living.^ A contrast is thus 
estabhshed between the repose of the dead and the 
ever-watchful activity of celestial ministers. Sleep 
so guarded, the sculptor seeks to tell us, must have 
glorious waking ; and when those hands unfold upon 
the Resurrection morning, the hushed sympathy of 
the attendant angels will break into smiles and sing- 
ing, as they lead the just man to the Lord he served 
in life. 

* It was long believed that he died ot eating- poisoned figs. 
"^ See above, p. 62, note, for the original conception of this motive 
at Orvieto. 



ii6 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

Whether Giovanni Pisano had any share in the 
sculpture on the fagade of the cathedral at Orvieto 
is not known for certain. Vasari asserts that Niccola 
and his pupils worked upon this series of bass-reliefs, 
setting forth the whole biblical history and the cycle 
of Christian beliefs from the creation of the world ^"^ 
the last judgment. Yet we know that Niccola him- 
self died at least twelve years before the foundation 
of the church in 1290; nor is there any proof that 
his immediate scholars were engaged upon the fabric. 
The Orvietan archives are singularly silent with 
regard to a monument of so large extent and vast 
importance, which must have taxed to the uttermost 
the resources of the ablest stone-carvers in Italy.^ 
Meanwhile, what Vasari says is valuable only as a 
witness to the fame of Niccola Pisano. His manner, 
as continued and developed by his school, is unmis- 
takable at Orvieto : but in the absence of direct 
information, we are left to conjecture the conditions 
under which this the closing if not the crowning 
achievement of thirteenth-century sculpture was pro- 
duced. 

When the great founder of Italian art visited 
Siena in 1266 for the completion of his pulpit in 
the Duomo, he found a guild of sculptors, or taglia- 
pietriy in that city, numbering some sixty members, 

* See * II Duomo di Orvieto, descritto ed illustrato per Lodovico 
Luzi,* pp. 330-339- 



BASS-RELIEFS AT ORVIETO, I17 

and governed by a rector and three chamberlains. 
Instead of regarding Niccola with jealousy, these 
craftsmen only sought to learn his method. Accord- 
ingly it seems that a new impulse was given to 
sculpture in Siena ; and famous workmen arose who 
combined this art with that of building. The chief 
of these was Lorenzo Maitani, who died in 1330, 
having designed and carried to completion the 
Duomo of Orvieto during his lifetime.^ While en- 
gaged in this great undertaking, Maitani directed a 
body of architects, stone-carvers, bronze-founders, 
mosaists, and painters, gathered together into a 
guild from the chief cities of Tuscany. It can not 
be proved that any of the Pisani, properly so called, 
were among their number. Lacking evidence to the 
contrary, we must give to Maitani, the master-spirit 
of the company, full credit for the sculpture carried 
out in obedience to his general plan. As the church 
of S. Francis at Assisi formed an epoch in the his- 
tory of painting, by concentrating the genius of 
Giotto on a series of masterpieces, so the Duomo of 
Orvieto, by giving free scope to the school of Pisa, 
marked a point in the history of sculpture. It would 
be difficult to find elsewhere even separate works of 
greater force and beauty belonging to this, the first 
or architectural, period of Italian sculpture ; and 

See Luzi, pp. 317-328, and the first extant commission given in 
1 3 10 to Maitani, which follows, pp. 328-330. 



n8 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

nowhere has the whole body of Christian belief been 
set forth with method more earnest and with vigor 
more sustained.^ The subjects selected by these 
unknown craftsmen for illustration in marble are in 
many instances the same as those afterward painted 
in fresco by Michael Angelo and Raphael at Rome. 
Their treatment, for example, of the creation of 
Adam and Eve, adopted in all probability from still 
earlier and ruder workmen, after being refined by 
the improvements of successive generations, may 
still be observed in the triumphs of the Sistine 
Chapel and the Loggie.^ It was the practice of 
Italian artists not to seek originality by diverging 
from the traditional modes of presentation, but to 

* The whole series has been admirably engraved under the super- 
intendence of Ludwig Griiner. Special attention may be directed to 
the groups of angels attendant on the Creator in his last day's work ; 
to the 'Adoration of the Shepherds,' distinguished by tender and idyllic 
grace ; and to the 'Adoration of the Magi,' marked no less by majesty. 
The dead breaking open the lids of their sarcophagi and rising to 
judgment are justly famous for spirited action. 

^ In Gothic sculpture of an early date the Bible narrative is lite- 
rally represented. God draws Eve from the open side of sleeping 
Adam. On the fagade of Orvieto this motive is less altered than re- 
fined. The wound in Adam's side is visible, but Eve is coming from 
behind his sleeping body in obedience to the beckoning hand of her 
Creator. Ghiberti in the bronze gate of the Florentine Baptistery still 
further develops the poetic beauty of the motive. Angels lift Eve in 
the air above Adam, in whose side there is now no open wound, and 
sustain her face to face with God, who calls her into life. Delia 
Querela, on the fagade of S. Petronio, confines himself to the creative 
act, expressed by the raised hand of the Maker, and the answering 
attitude of Eve; and this conception receives final treatment from 
Michael Angelo in the frescoes of the Sistine. 



ANDREA PISANO. 119 

prove their mastery by rendering these as perfect 
and effective as the maturity of art could make 
them. For the Italians, as before them for the 
Greeks, plagiarism was a word unknown, in all cases 
where it was possible to improve upon the invention 
of less fortunate predecessors. The student of art 
may, therefore, now enjoy the pleasure of tracing 
sculpturesque or pictorial motives from their genesis 
in some rude fragment to their final development in 
the master-works of a Lionardo or a Raphael, where 
scientific grouping of figures, higher ideahzation of 
style, the suggestion of freer movement, and more 
varied dramatic expression yield at last the full 
flower that the simple germ enfolded. 

Among the most distinguished scholars of Nic- 
cola Pisano's tradition must now be mentioned An- 
drea da Pontadera, called Andrea Pisano, who carried 
the manner of his master to Florence, and helped 
to fulfill the destiny of Italian sculpture by submitting 
it to the rising art of painting. Under the direction of 
Giotto he carved statues for the Campanile and the 
fagade of S. Maria del Fiore ; and in the first gate of 
the Baptistery he bequeathed a model of bass-relief in 
bronze, which largely influenced the style of .nasters 
in the fifteenth century. To overpraise the simplicity 
and beauty of design, the purity of feeling, and the 
technical excellence of Andrea's bronze-work would 
be difficult Many students will always be found to 



I20 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

prefer his self-restraint and delicacy to the more 
florid manner of Ghiberti.^ What we chiefly observe 
in this gate is the control exercised by the sister art 
of painting over his mode of conception and treat- 
ment. If Giovanni Pisano developed the dramatic 
and emphatic qualities of Gothic sculpture, Andrea 
was attracted to its allegories ; if Giovanni infused 
romantic vehemence of feeling into the frigid class- 
icism of his father, Andrea diverged upon an- 
other track of picturesque delineation. A new sun 
had now arisen in the heavens of art. This was 
the sun of Giotto, whose genius, eminently pictorial, 
brought the Italians to a true sense of their aesthet- 
ical vocation, illuminating with its brightness the 
elder and more technically finished craft of the 
stone-carver. Sculpture, which in the school of 
Niccola Pisano had been subordinate to architec- 
ture, became a sub-species of painting in the hands 
of Andrea. 

It was thus, as I have elsewhere stated, that 
the twofold doom of plastic art in Italy was accom- 
plished. In order to embody the ideas of Chris- 
tianity, art had to think more of expression than of 
pure form. Expression is the special sphere of paint- 
mg ; and therefore sculpture followed the lead of the 
sister art, as soon as painting was strong enough to 

* ' Le Tre Porte del Battistero di San Giovanni di Firenze, incise 
ed illustrate' (Firenze, 1821), contains outlines of all Andrea Pisano's 
and Ghiberti's work. 



SCULPTURE AND PAINTING. 121 

give that lead, instead of remaining, as in Greece, the 
mistress of her own domain. On the deeper reasons 
for this subordination of sculpture to painting I have 
dwelt already, while showing that a large class of 
subjects, where physical qualities are comparatively 
indifferent and of no account, were forced upon the 
artist by Christianity.^ Humility and charity may 
be found alike in blooming youth or in ascetic age ; 
nor is it possible to characterize saints and martyrs 
by those corporeal characteristics which distinguish 
a runner from a boxer, or a chaste huntress from a 
voluptuous queen of love. Italian sculpture aban- 
doned the presentation of the naked human body 
as useless. The emotions written on the face be- 
came of more importance than the modeling of the 
limbs, and recourse was had to allegorical symbols 
or emblematic attitudes for the interpretation of the 
artist's thought. Andrea Pisano's figure of Hope, 
raising hands and eyes toward an offered crown, 
seems but a repetition of the motive expressed 
by Giotto in the chiaroscuro frescoes of the Arena 
chapel.^ Owing to similar causes, drapery, which in 
Greece had served to illustrate the structure or the 
movement of the body it clothed, was used by the 
Italian sculptors to conceal the iimbs, and to enhance 
by flowing skirt or sinuous fold or agitated scarf 

* See above, pp. 12-18. 

"^ What Giotto himself was, as a designer for sculpture, is shown in 
the little reliefs upon the basement of his campanile. 



122 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY, 

some quality of the emotions. The result was that 
sculpture assumed a place subordinate to painting, 
and that the masterpieces of the early Italian carv- 
ers are chiefly bass-reliefs — pictures in bronze or 
marble. 

In a like degree, though not for the same reason, 
sculpture in Italy remained subordinate to architec- 
ture, until such time as the neo-Hellenism of the 
full Renaissance produced a crowd of pseudo-classic 
statues, destined to take their places — not in churches, 
but in the courtyards of palaces and on the open 
squares of cities. The cause of this fact is not far 
to seek. In ancient Greece the temple had been 
erected for the god, and the statue dwelt within the 
cella like a master in his house. Christianity for- 
bade an image of the living God ; consequently the 
Church had another object than to roof the statue 
of a deity. It was the meeting-place of a congre- 
gation bent on worshiping Him who dwells not in 
houses made with hands, and whom the heaven of 
heavens can not contain. The vast spaces and aerial 
arcades of mediaeval architecture had their meaning 
in relation to the mystic apprehension of an unseen 
power. It followed of necessity that the carved 
work destined to decorate a Christian temple could 
never be the main feature of the building. It ex- 
isted for the Church, and not the Church fo' iO 

' What has previously been noted in the chapter upon architecture 



THE PI SAN STYLE IN NORTH ITALY, 123 

Through Andrea Pisano the style of Niccola 
was extended to Venice. There is reason to believe 
that he instructed Filippo Calendario, to whom we 
should ascribe the sculptured corners of the Ducal 
Palace. Venice, however, invariably exercised her 
own controlling influence over the arts of aliens ; so 
we find a larger, freer, richer, and more mundane 
treatment in these splendid carvings than in aught 
produced by Pisan workmen for their native towns 
of Tuscany, 

Nino, the sculptor of the Madonna delta Rosa, 
the chief ornament of the Spina chapel, and Tom- 
maso, both sons of Andrea da Pontalera, together 
with Giovanni Balduccio of Pisa, continued the 
traditions of the school founded by Niccola. Bal- 
duccio, invited by Azzo Visconti to Milan, carved 
the shrine of S. Peter Martyr in the church of 
S.Eustorgio, and impressed his style on Matteo da 
Campione, the sculptor of the shrine of S. Augus- 
tine at Pavia.^ These facts, though briefly stated, 
are not without significance. Travelers who have 

deserves repetition here — that the Italian style of building gave more 
scope to independent sculpture, owing to its preference for flat walls, 
and its rejection of multiplied niches, canopies, and so forth, than the 
Northern GoK;hic. Thus, however subordinated to architecture, sculp- 
ture in Italy still had more scope for self-assertion than in Germany 
or France. 

^ See Perldns, ' Italian Sculptors,' p. 109, for a description of the 
Area di S. Agostino, which he assigns to Matteo and Bonino da 
Campione. This shrine, now in the Duomo, was made for the sacristy 
pf S. Pietroin Cielo d'Qro, where it stood until the year 1832. 



124 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY, 

visited the churches of Pavia and Milan, after 
studying the shrine, or area as Italians call it, of 
S. Dominic at Bologna, must have noticed the 
ascendency of Pisan style in these three Lombard 
towns, and have felt how widely Niccola's creative 
genius was exercised. Traces of the same influence 
may perhaps be observed in the tombs of the 
Scaligers at Verona.* 

The most eminent pupil of Andrea Pisano, how- 
ever, was a Florentine — the great Andrea Arcag- 
nuolo di Cione, commonly known as Orcagna. This 
man, like the more illustrious Giotto, was one 
cimoixg the earliest of those comprehensive, many- 
sided natures produced by Florence for her ever- 
lasting glory He studied the goldsmith's craft 
under his father, Cione, passing the years of his 
apprenticeship, like other Tuscan artists, in the 
technical details of an industry that then supplied 
the strictest method of design. With his brother, 
Bernardo, he practiced painting. Like Giotto, he 
was no mean poet ; ^ and like all the higher crafts- 
men of his age, ho was an architect. Though the 
church of Orsammichele owes its present form to 
Taddeo Gaddi, Orcagna, as capo maestro after Gaddi's 
death, completed the structure; and though the 

* Bonino da Campione, the Milanese, who may have had a hand in 
the Area di S. Agostino, carved the tomb of Can Signorio. That of 
Martino II. was executed by another Milanese, Perino. 

' See Trucchi, ' Poesie Italiane Inedite, vol. ii. 



ORCAGNAKS TABERNACLE, 125 

Loggia de' Lanzi, long ascribed to him by writers 
upon architecture, is now known to be the work of 
Benci di Cione, yet Orcagna*s Loggia del Bigallo, 
more modest but not less beautiful, prepared the way 
for its construction. Of his genius as a painter, 
proved by the frescoes in the Strozzi chapel, I shall 
have to speak hereafter. As a sculptor he is best 
known through the tabernacle of Orsammichele, built 
to enshrine the picture of Madonna by Ugolino da 
Siena.^ 

In this monument Orcagna employed carved 
bass-reliefs and statuettes, intaglios and mosaics, in- 
crustations of agates, enamels, and gilded glass pat- 
terns, with a sense of harmony so refined, and a 
mastery over each kind of workmanship so perfect, 
that the whole tabernacle is an epitome of the minor 
arts of mediaeval Italy. The subordination of sculp- 
ture to architectural effect is noticeable ; and the 
Giottesque influence appears even more strongly 
here than in the gate of Andrea Pisano. This in- 
fluence Orcagna received indirectly through his 
master in stone carving; it formed, indeed, the 
motive force of figurative art during his lifetime. 
The subjects of the Annunciation, the Nativity, 
the Marriage of the Virgin, and the Adoration of 
the Three Kings, framed in octagonal moldings at 

See the illustrated work, * II Tabernacolo della Madonna d'Or- 
sammichele,' Firenze, 1851. 



126 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY, 

the base of the tabernacle, illustrate the domination 
of a spirit distinct both from the neo-Romanism of 
Niccola and the Gothicism of Giovanni Pisano. 
That spirit is Florentine in a general sense, and 
specifically Giottesque. Charity, again, with a flaming 
heart in her hand, crowned with a flaming brazier, 
and suckling a child, is Giottesque not only in alle- 
gorical conception but also in choice of type and 
treatment of drapery. 

While admiring the tabernacle of Orsammichele, 
we are reminded that Orcagna was a goldsmith to 
begin with, and a painter. Sculpture he practiced as 
an accessory. What the artists of Florence gained 
in delicacy of execution, accuracy of modeling, and 
precision of design by their apprenticeship to the 
goldsmith's trade was hardly perhaps sufficient to 
compensate for loss of training in a larger style. It 
was difficult, we fancy, for men so educated to con- 
ceive the higher purposes of sculpture. Contented 
with elaborate workmanship and beauty of detail, 
they failed to attain to such independence of treat- 
ment as may be reached by sculptors who do not 
carry to their work the preconceptions of a nar- 
rower handicraft. Thus even Orcagna's master- 
piece may strike us not as the plaything of a 
Pheidian genius condescending for once to ' breathe 
through silver/ but of a consummate goldsmith taxing 



THE BAPTISTERY GATES. 127 

the resources of his craft to form a monumental 
jewel.^ 

The fagade of Orvieto was the final achievement 
of the first or architectural period of Italian sculp- 
ture. Giotto, Andrea Pisano, and Orcagna, formed 
the transition to the second period. To find one 
characteristic title for the style of the fifteenth cen- 
tury is not easy, since it was marked by many dis- 
tinct peculiarities. If, however, we choose to call it 
pictorial, we shall sufficiently mark the quality of 
some eminent masters, and keep in view the su- 
premacy of painting at this epoch. A great public 
enterprise at Florence brings together in honorable 
rivalry the chief craftsmen of the new age, and 
marks the advent of the Renaissance. When the 
Signory, in concert with the Arte de' Mercanti, de- 
cided to complete the bronze gates of the Baptistery 
in the first year of the fifteenth century, they issued 
a manifesto inviting the sculptors of Italy to prepare 
designs for competition. Their call was answered 
by Giacomo della Quercia of Siena, by Filippo Bru- 
nelleschi and Lorenzo di Cino Ghiberti of Florence, 
and by two other Tuscan artists of less note. The 
young Donatello, aged sixteen, is said to have been 
consulted as to the rival merits of the proofs sub- 
mitted to the judges. Thus the four great masters 

' The weighty chapter in Alberti's * Treatise on Painting,' lib. iii. 
cap. 5, might be used to support this paragraph. 



128 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY, 

of Tuscan art in its prime met before the Florentine 
Baptistery.^ Giacomo della Quercia was excluded 
from the competition at an early stage ; but the 
umpires wavered long between Ghiberti and Bru- 
nelleschi, until the latter with notable generosity, 
feeling the superiority of his rival, and conscious 
perhaps that his own laurels were to be gathered in 
the field of architecture, withdrew his claim. In 
1403 Ghiberti received the commission for the first 
of the two remaining gates. He afterward obtained 
the second ; and as they were not finished until 
1452, the better part of his lifetime was spent upon 
them. He received in all a sum of 30,798 golden 
florins for his labor and the cost of the material 
employed. 

The trial-pieces prepared by Brunelleschi and 
Ghiberti are now preserved in the Bargello.^ Their 
subject is the Sacrifice of Isaac ; and a comparison 
of the two leaves no doubt of Ghiberti's superiority. 
The faults of BrunelleschiV, model are want of re- 
pose and absence of composition. Abraham rushes 
in a frenzy of murderous agitation at his son, who 
writhes beneath the knife already at his throat. The 
angel swoops from heaven with extended arms, 
reaching forth one hand to shov/ the ram to Abra- 

' Quercia, bom 1374; Ghiberti, 1378; Brunelleschi. 1379; Dona- 
tello, 1386. 

^ They are engraved in the work cited above, *Le Tre Porte, 
seconda Porta, Tavole i. e ii. 



GHIBERTI AND BRUNELLESCHL 129 

ham, and clasping the patriarch's wrist with the 
other. The ram meanwhile is scratching his nose 
with his near hind leg ; one of the servants is taking 
a thorn from his foot, while the other fills a cup 
from the stream at which the ass is drinking. Thus 
each figure has a separate uneasy action. Those 
critics who contend that the unrest of sixteenth-cen- 
tury sculpture was due to changes in artistic and 
religious feeling wrought by the Renaissance would 
do well to examine this plate, and see how much 
account must be taken of the artist's temperament 
in forming their opinion. Brunelleschi adhered to 
the style and taste of the fifteenth century at its 
commencement ; but the too fervid quality of his 
character impaired his work as a sculptor. Ghiberti, 
on the other hand, translated the calm of his harmo- 
nious nature into his composition. The angel leans 
from heaven and points to the ram, which is seated 
quietly and out of sight of the main actors. Isaac 
kneels in the attitude of a submissive victim, though 
his head is turned aside, as if attracted by the rush of 
pinions through the air ; while Abraham has but just 
lifted his hand, and the sacrifice is only suggested as 
a possibility by the naked knife. The two servants 
are grouped below in conversation, one on each side 
of the browsing ass. This power of telling a story 
plainly, but without dramatic vehemence ; of elimi- 
nating the painful details of the subject, and combin- 



130 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

ing its chief motives into one agreeable whole, gave 
peculiar charm to Ghiberti's manner. It marked 
him as an artist distinguished by good taste. 

How Delia Querela created the Sacrifice of Isaac 
we do not know. His bass-reliefs upon the fa9ade of 
S. Petronio at Bologna, and round the font of S. 
John's Chapel in the cathedral of Siena, enable us, 
however, to compare his style with that of Ghiberti 
in the handling of a subject common to both, the 
Creation of Eve} There is no doubt but that Delia 
Querela was a formidable rival. Had the gates 
of the Baptistery been intrusted to his execution, 
we might have possessed a masterpiece of more 
heroic style. While smoothness and an almost 
voluptuous suavity of outline distinguish Ghiberti's 
naked Eve, gliding upheld by angels from the side 
of Adam at her Maker's bidding, Delia Quercia's 
group, by the concentration of robust and rugged 
power, anticipates the style of Michael Angelo. 
Ghiberti treats the subject pictorially, placing his 

^ The bass-reliefs of S. Petronio were executed between 1425 and 
1435. Those of the font in the chapel of S. John (not the lower 
church of S. John), at Siena, are ascribed to Quercia, and are in his 
manner ; but when they were finished I do not know. They set forth 
six subjects from the story of Adam and Eve, with a compartment de- 
voted to Hercules killing the Centaur Nessus, and another to Samson 
or Hercules and the Lion. The choice of subjects, affording scope for 
treatment of the nude, is characteristic ; so is the energy of handling, 
though rude in detail. It may be worth while to notice here a similar 
series of reliefs upon the fagade of the Colleoni Chapel at Bergamo, 
representing scenes from the story of Adam in conjunction with the 
labors of Hercules. 



GHIBERTI AND BELLA QUERCIA. 131 

figures in a landscape, and lavishing attendant 
angels. Delia Quercia, in obedience to the stricter 
laws of sculpture, restrains his composition to the 
three chief persons, and brings them into close con- 
nection. While Adam reclines asleep in a beautiful 
and highly-studied attitude. Eve has just stepped 
forth behind him, and God stands robed in massive 
drapery, raising His hand as though to draw her into 
life. There is, perhaps, an excess of dramatic action 
in the lifted right leg of Eve, and too much of 
pantomimic language in the expressive hands of Eve 
and her Creator. The robe, again, in its volumi- 
nous and snaky coils, and the triangular nimbus of 
the Deity, produce an effect of heaviness rather 
than of majesty. Yet we feel, while studying 
this composition, that it is a noble and original at- 
tempt, falling but little short of supreme accomplish- 
ment. Without this antecedent sketch, Michael 
Angelo might not have matured the most complete 
of all his designs in the Sistine Chapel. The simi- 
larity between Delia Quercia's bass-relief and Buonar- 
roti's fresco of Eve is incontestable. The young 
Florentine, while an exile in Bologna, and engaged 
upon the shrine of S. Dominic, must have spent 
hours of study before the sculptures of S. Petronio ; 
so that this seed of Delia Quercia's sowing bore 
after many years the fruit of world-renowned achieve- 
ment in Rome. 



132 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

Two Other memorable works of Delia Querela 
must be parenthetically mentioned. These are the 
Fonte Gaja on the public square of Siena, now un- 
happily restored, and the portrait of Ilaria del Car- 
retto on her tomb in the cathedral of Lucca. The 
latter has long been dear to English students of 
Italian art through words inimitable for their 
strength of sympathetic criticism.^ 

Ghiberti was brought up as a goldsmith by his 
stepfather, and it is said that while a youth he spent 
much of his leisure in modeling portraits and cast- 
ing imitations of antique gems and coins for his 
friends. At the same time he practiced painting. 
We find him employed in decorating a palace at 
Rimini for Carlo Malatesta, when his stepfather 
recalled him to Florence, in order that he might 
compete for the Gate of the Baptistery. It is prob- 
able that from this early training Ghiberti derived 
the delicacy of style and smoothness of execution 
that are reckoned among the chief merits of his 
work. He also developed a manner more pictorial 
than sculpturesque, which justifies our calling him a 
painter in bronze. When Sir Joshua Reynolds re- 
marked, 'Ghiberti^s landscape and buildings occu- 
pied so large a portion of the compartments that 
the figures remained but secondary objects,'^ his 

* Ruskin's * Modem Painters,' vol. ii. chap vii., Repose. 

• See Flaxman's * Lectures on Sculpture/ p. 310. 



PICTURESQUE BASS-RELIEF, 133 

criticism might fairly have been taxed with some in- 
justice even to the second of the two gates. Yet, 
though exaggerated in severity, his words convey a 
truth important for the understanding of this period 
of ItaHan art. 

The first gate may be cited as the supreme 
achievement of bronze-casting in the Tuscan prime. 
In the second, by the introduction of elaborate land- 
scapes and the massing together of figures arranged 
in multitudes at three and sometimes four distances, 
Ghiberti overstepped the limits that separate sculp- 
ture from painting. Having learned perspective 
from Brunelleschi, he was eager to apply this new 
science to his own craft, not discerning that it has 
no place in noble bass-relief He therefore aban- 
doned the classical and the early Tuscan tradition, 
whereby reliefs, whether high or low, are strictly 
restrained to figures arranged in line or grouped 
together without accessories. Instead of painting 
frescoes, he set himself to model in bronze whole 
compositions that might have been expressed witli 
propriety in color. The point of Sir Joshua's 
criticism, therefore, is that Ghiberti 's practice cf 
distributing figures on a small scale in spacious 
landscape framework was at variance with the 
severity of sculptural treatment. The pernicious 
effect of his example may be traced in much Flo- 
rentine work of the mid- Renaissance period which 



134 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

passed for supremely clever when it was produced 
What the unique genius of Ghiberti made not 
merely pardonable but even admirable became 
under other hands no less repulsive than the trans- 
ference of pictorial effects to painted glass.^ 

That Ghiberti was not a great sculptor of statues 
is proved by his work at Orsammichele. He was 
no architect, as we know from his incompetence 
to do more than impede Brunelleschi in the building 
of the dome. He came into the world to create 
a new and inimitable style of hybrid beauty in 
those gates of Paradise. His susceptibility to the 
first influences of the classical revival deserves notice 
here, since it shows to what an extent a devotee 
of Greek art in the fifteenth century could worship 
the relics of antiquity without passing over into 
imitation. When thQ HermapkrodztevjdiSdiscoYtrcd. 
in the vineyard of S. Celso, Ghiberti's admiration 
found vent in exclamations like the following : ' No 
tongue could describe the learning and art displayed 
in it, or do justice to its masterly style.' Another 
antique, found near Florence, must, he conjectures, 
have been hidden out of harm's way by 'some 
gentle spirit in the early days of Christianity.' 
* The touch only,' he adds, * can discover its beau- 

* This criticism of tlie ' Gate of Paradise ' sounds even to the writer 
of it profane, and demands a palinode. Who, indeed, can affirm that 
he would wish the floating figure of Eve or the three angels at Abra- 
ham's tent-door other than they are? 



EARLY AND LATE CLASSICISM, 135 

ties, which escape the sense of sight in any light.' ^ 
It would be impossible to express a reverential 
love of ancient art more tenderly than is done in 
these sentences. So intense was Ghiberti's passion 
for the Greeks that he rejected Christian chronol- 
ogy and reckoned by Olympiads — a system that 
has thrown obscurity over his otherwise precious 
notes of Tuscan artists. In spite of this devotion, 
he never appears to have set himself consciously 
to reproduce the style of Greek sculpture, or to 
have set forth Hellenic ideas. He remained un- 
affectedly natural, and in a true sense Christian. 
The paganism of the Renaissance is a phrase with 
no more meaning for him than for that still more 
dehcate Florentine spirit, Luca della Robbia ; and 
if his works are classical, they are so only in 
Goethe's sense, when he pronounced, 'the point 
is for a work to be thoroughly good, and then it 
is sure to be classical.' 

One great advantage of the early days of the 
Renaissance over the latter was this, that pseudo- 
paganism and pedantry had not as yet distorted 
the judgment or misdirected the aims of artists. 
Contact with the antique world served only to 
stimulate original endeavor, by leading the stu- 
dent back to the fountain of all excellence in nature, 

^ See the ' Commentaries of Ghiberti,' printed in vol. i. of Vasari 
(Lemonnier, 1846). 



136 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY, 

and by exhibiting types of perfection in technical 
processes. To ape the sculptors of Antinous, or 
to bring to life again the gods who died with Pan, 
was not yet longed for. Of the impunity with 
which a sculptor in that period could submit his 
genius to the service and the study of ancient art 
without sacrificing individuality, Donatello furnishes 
a still more illustrious example than Ghiberti. 
Early in his youth Donatello journeyed with Bru- 
nelleschi to Rome, in order to acquaint himself 
with the monuments then extant. How thoroughly 
he comprehended the classic spirit is proved by the 
bronze patera wrought for his patron Ruberto Mar- 
telli, and by the frieze of the triumphant Bacchus.^ 
Yet the great achievements of his genius were 
Christian in their sentiment and realistic in their 
style. The bronze Magdalen of the Florentine 
Baptistery and the bronze Baptist of the Duomo 
at Siena ^ are executed with an unrelenting ma- 
terialism, not alien indeed to the sincerity of classic 
art, but divergent from antique tradition, inasmuch 
as the ideas of repentant and prophetic asceticism 
had no place in Greek mythology. 

Donatello, with the uncompromising candor of 
an artist bent on marking character, felt that he was 
bound to seize the very pith and kernel of his subject 

* The patera is at South Kensington, the frieze at Florence. 
"^ As also the wooden Baptist in the Frari at Venice. 



DONATELLQS FIDELITY TO NATURE. 137 

If a Magdalen were demanded of him, he would not 
condescend to model a Venus and then place a 
book and skull upon a rock beside her ; nor did 
he imagine that the bloom and beauty of a laugh- 
ing Faun were fitting attributes for the preacher 
of repentance. It remained for later artists, in- 
toxicated with antique loveliness and corroded with 
worldly skepticism, to reproduce the outward sem- 
blance of Greek deities under the pretense of 
setting forth the myths of Christianity. Such com- 
promise had not occurred to Donatello. The mo- 
tive of his art was clearly apprehended, his method 
was sincere; certain phases of profound emotion 
had to be represented with the physical charac- 
teristics proper to them. The result, ugly and 
painful as it may sometimes be, was really more 
concordant with the spirit of Greek method than 
Lionardo's John or Correggio's Magdalen. That 
is to say, it was straightforward and truthful ; 
whereas the strange caprices of the later Renais- 
sance too often betrayed a double mind, disloyal 
alike to paganism and to Christianity, in their effort 
to combine divergent forces. It may still be argued 
that such conceptions as sorrow for sin and mor- 
tification of the flesh, unflinchingly portrayed by 
haggard gauntness in the saints of Donatello, are 
unfit for sculpturesque expression. 

A more felicitous embodiment of modern feel- 



xsB /RENAISSANCE IN ITAL V. 

ing was achieved by Donatello in S. George and 
David. The former is a marble statue placed 
upon the north wall of Orsammichele ; the latter 
is a bronze, cast for Cosimo de' Medici, and now 
exhibited in the Bargello.^ Without striving to 
idealize his models, the sculptor has expressed in 
both the Christian conception of heroism, fearless 
in the face of danger, and sustained by faith. The 
naked beauty of the boy David and the mailed 
manhood of S. George are raised to a spiritual 
region by the type of feature and the pose of 
body selected to interpret their animating impulse. 
These are no mere portraits of wrestlers such as 
peopled the groves of Altis at Olympia, no ideals 
of physical strength translated into brass and 
marble, like the Hercules of Naples or the Vatican. 
The one is a Christian soldier ready to engage 
Apollyon in battle to the death ; the other the 
boy-hero of a marvelous romance. The body 
in both is but the shrine of an indwelling soul, 
the instrument and agent of a faith-directed will ; 
and the crown of their conflict is no wreath of 
laurel or of parsley. In other words, the value 
of S. George and David to the sculptor lay not 
in their strength and youthful beauty — though he 
has endowed them with these excellent gifts — 

* There is another 'David,' by Donatello, in marble; also in the 
Bargello, scarcely less stiff and ugly than the ' Baptist.' 



DONATELLO'S MASTERPIECES. 139 

SO much as in their significance for the eternal 
struggle of the soul with evil. The same power 
of expressing Christian sentiment in a form of 
perfect beauty, transcending the Greek type by 
profounder suggestion of feeling, is illustrated in 
the well-known low-relief of an angel's head in 
profile, technically one of Donatello's most masterly 
productions.^ 

It is no part of my present purpose to enumerate 
the many works of Donatello in marble and bronze ; 
yet some allusion to their number and variety is 
necessary in order to show how widely his influence 
was diffused through Italy. In the monuments of 
Pope John XXI 1 1., of Cardinal Brancacci, and of 
Bartolommeo Aragazzi, he subordinated his genius to 
the treatment of sepulchral and biographical subjects 
according to time-honored Tuscan usage. They 
were severally placed in Florence, Naples, and Mon- 
tepulciano. For the cathedral of Prato he executed 
bass-reliefs of dancing boys ; a similar series, intended 
for the balustrades of the organ in S. Maria del 
Fiore, is now preserved in the Bargello museum. 
The exultation of movement has never been ex- 
pressed in stone with more fidelity to the strict rules 
of plastic art. For his friend and patron, Cosimo 
de Medici, he cast in bronze the group oi Judith 
and Holof ernes — a work that illustrates the clumsi- 

' The cast was published by the Arundel Society. The original 
belongs to Lord Elcho. 



140 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

ness of realistic treatment, and deserves to be 
remembered chiefly for its strange fortunes. When 
the Medici fled from Florence in 1494, their palace 
was sacked ; the new republic took possession 
of Donatello's Judith, and placed it on a pedestal 
before the gate of the Palazzo Vecchio, with this 
inscription, ominous to would-be despots : Exe7nplum 
salutis pttbliccB cives postiere. MCCCCXC V, It now 
stands near Cellini's Perseus under the Loggia de' 
Lanzi. For the pulpits of S. Lorenzo, Donatello 
made designs of intricate bronze bass-reliefs, which 
were afterward completed by his pupil Bertoldo. 
These, though better known to travelers, are less 
excellent than the reliefs in bronze wrought by 
Donatello's own hand for the church of S. An- 
thony at Padua.^ To that city he was called in 
145 1, in order that he might model the equestrian 
statue of Gattamelata. It still stands on the 
Piazza, a masterpiece of scientific bronze-founding, 
the first great portrait of a general on horseback 
since the days of Rome.^ At Padua, in the hall of 
the Palazzo della Ragione, is also preserved the 
wooden horse, which is said to have been con- 
structed by the sculptor for the noble house of 

* It has been suggested, with good show of reason, that Montegna 
was largely indebted to these bass-reliefs for his lofty style. 

' This omits the statues of the Scaligers : but no mediaeval work 
aimed at equal animation. The antique bronze horses at Venice and 
the statue of Marcus Aurelius must have been in Donatello's mind. 



ANDREA VEROCCHIO. 141 

Capodilista. These two examples of equestrian 
modeling marked an epoch in Italian statuary. 

When Donato di Nicolo di Betto Bardi, called 
Donatello because men loved his sweet and cheerful 
temper, died in 1466 at the age of eighty, the 
brightest light of Italian sculpture in its most promis- 
ing period was extinguished. Donatello's influence, 
felt far and wide through Italy, was of inestimable 
value in correcting the false direction toward pic- 
torial sculpture which Ghiberti, had he flourished 
alone at Florence, might have given to the art. His 
style was always eminently masculine. However 
tastes may differ about the positive merits of his 
severial works, there can be no doubt that the prin- 
ciples of sincerity, truth to nature, and technical 
accuracy they illustrate were all-important in an age 
that lent itself too readily to the caprices of the 
fancy and the puerilities of florid taste. To regret 
that Donatello lacked Ghiberti's exquisite sense of 
beauty, is tantamount to wishing that two of the 
greatest artists of the world had made one man 
between them. 

Donatello did not, in the strict sense of the term, 
found a school.^ Andrea Verocchio, goldsmith, 
painter, and worker in bronze, was the most distin- 

' The sculptor of a beautiful tomb erected for the Countess of 
Montorio and her infant daughter in the church of S. Bernardino at 
Aquila was probably Andrea dell' Aquila, a pupil of Donatello. See 
Perkins's ' Italian Sculptors,^ pp. 46, 47. 



144 RENAISSANCE IN JTAlV. 

guished of his pupils. To all the arts he practiced, 
Verocchio applied limited powers, a meager manner, 
and a prosaic mind. Yet few men have exercised 
at a very critical moment a more decided influence. 
The mere fact that he numbered Lionardo da Vinci, 
Lorenzo di Credi, and Pietro Perugino among his 
scholars proves the esteem of his contemporaries ; 
and when we have observed that the type of face 
selected by Lionardo and transmitted to his fol- 
lowers appears also in the pictures of Lorenzo di 
Credi and is first found in the David of Verocchio, 
we have a right to affirm that the master of these 
men was an artist of creative genius as well as a 
careful workman. Florence still points with pride 
to the Incredulity of Thomas on the eastern wall of 
Orsammichele, to the Boy and Dolphin in the court 
of the Palazzo Vecchio, and to the David of this 
sculptor : but the first is spoiled by heaviness and an- 
gularity of drapery ; the second, though fanciful and 
marked by fluttering movement, is but a caprice ; 
the third outdoes the hardest work of Donatello by 
its realism. Verocchio's David, a lad of some seven- 
teen years, has the lean, veined arms of a stone-hewer 
or gold-beater. As a faithful portrait of the first 
Florentine prentice who came to hand, this statue 
might have merit but for the awkward cuirass and 
kilt that partly drape the figure. 

The name of Verocchio is best known to the 



THE STATUE OF COLLEONI. 143 

world through the equestrian statue of Barto- 
lommeo Colleoni. When this great Condottiere, 
the last surviving general trained by Braccio da 
Montone, died in 1475, he bequeathed a large por- 
tion of his wealth to Venice, on condition that his 
statue should be erected on horseback in the Piazza 
di S. Marco. Colleoni, having long held the baton 
of the Republic, desired that after death his portrait, 
in his habit as he lived, should continue to look 
down on the scene of his old splendor. By an 
ingenious quibble the Senators adhered to the letter 
of his will without infringing a law that forbade 
them to charge the square of S. Mark with monu- 
ments. They ruled that the Piazza in front of the 
Scuola di S. Marco, better known as the Campo 
di S. Zanipolo, might be chosen as the site of Col- 
leoni's statue, and to Andrea Verocchio was given 
the commission for its erection. 

Andrea died in 1488 before the model for the 
horse was finished. The work was completed, and 
the pedestal was supplied by Alessandro Leopardi. 
To Verocchio, profiting by the example of Donatello's 
Gattamelata, must be assigned the general concep- 
tion of this statue ; but the breath of life that ani- 
mates both horse and rider, the richness of detail 
that enhances the massive grandeur of the group, 
and the fiery spirit of its style of execution were due 
to the Venetian genius of Leopardi. Verocchio 



144 RENAISSANCE IN ITAL V, 

alone produced nothing so truly magnificent. This 
joint creation of Florentine science and Venetian 
fervor is one of the most precious monuments of 
the Renaissance. From it we learn what the men 
who fought the bloodless battles of the common- 
wealths, and who aspired to principality, were like. 
' He was tall,' writes a biographer of Colleoni/ ' of 
erect and well-knit figure, and well-proportioned 
limbs. His complexion tended rather to brown, 
marked withal by bright and sanguine flesh-tints. 
He had black eyes ; their brilliancy was vivid, their 
gaze terrible and penetrating. In the outline of his 
nose and in all his features he displayed a manly 
nobleness combined with goodness and prudence.' 
Better phrases can not be chosen to describe his statue. 
While admiring this masterpiece and dwelling 
on its royal style, we are led to deplore most 
bitterly the loss of the third equestrian statue of the 
Renaissance. Nothing now remains but a few tech- 
nical studies made by Lionardo da Vinci for his 
portrait of Francesco Sforza. The two elaborate 
models he constructed and the majority of his minute 
designs have been destroyed. He intended, we are 
told, to represent the first Duke of the Sforza 
dynasty on his charger, trampling the body of a 
prostrate and just conquered enemy. Rubens' tran- 

* ' Istoria della Vita e Fatti dell' eccellentissimo Capitano di guerra 
Bartolommeo Colleoni/ scritta per Pietro Spino. Republished, 1859. 



ANTONIO DEL POLLAJUOLO, 145 

script from the Battle of the Standard, enables us 
to comprehend to some extent how Lionardo might 
have treated this motive. The severe and cautious 
style of Donatello, after gaining freedom and fervor 
from Leopardi, was adapted to the ideal presentation 
of dramatic passion by Lionardo. Thus Gattame- 
lata, Colleoni, and Francesco Sforza would, through 
their statues, have marked three distinct phases in the 
growth of art. The final effort of Italian sculpture 
to express human activity in the person of a mounted 
warrior has perished. In this sphere we possess 
nothing which, like the tombs of S. Lorenzo in 
relation to sepulchral statuary, completes a series of 
development. 

If Donatello founded no school, this was far 
more the case with Ghiberti. His supposed pupil, 
Antonio del Pollajuolo, showed no sign of Ghiberti's 
influence, but struck out for himself a style distin- 
guished by almost brutal energy and bizarre realism 
— characteristics the very opposite to those of his 
master. If the bronze relief of the Crucifixion in 
the Bargello be really Pollajuolo's, we may even 
trace a leaning to Verocchio in his manner. The 
emphatic passion of the women recalls the group 
of mourners round the death-bed of Selvaggia Tor- 
nabuoni in Verocchio's celebrated bass-relief. Polla- 
juolo, like so many Florentine artists, was a gold- 
smith, a painter, and a worker in niello, before he 



146 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

took to sculpture. As a goldsmith he is said to 
have surpassed all his contemporaries, and his 
mastery over this art influenced his style in general. 
What we chiefly notice, however, in his choice of 
subjects is a frenzy of murderous enthusiasm, a 
grimness of imagination, rare among Italian artists. 
The picture in the Uffizzi of Hercules and Antcsus 
and the well-known engraving of naked men fight- 
ing a series of savage duels in a wood, might be 
chosen as emphatic illustrations of his favorite mo- 
tives. The fiercest emotions of the Renaissance find 
expression in the clenched teeth, strained muscles, 
knotted brows, and tense nerves depicted by 
PoUajuolo with eccentric energy. We seem to be 
assisting at some of those combats a steccato chiuso 
wherein Sixtus IV. delighted, or to have before 
our eyes a fray between Crocensi and Vallensi in 
the streets of Rome.^ The same remarks apply to 
the terra-cotta relief by PoUajuolo in the South 
Kensington Museum. This piece displays the 
struggles of twelve naked men, divided into six 
pairs of combatants. Two of the couples hold 
short chains with the left hand, and seek to stab 
each other with the right. In the case of another 
two couples the fight is over, and the victor is insult- 
ing his fallen foe. In each of the remaining pairs 
one gladiator is on the point of yielding to \i\'^ 

^ See ' Age of the Despots/ p. 395, note 2. 



TOMBS OF STXTUS AND INNOCENT. 147 

adversary. There are thus three several moments 
of duel to the death, each illustrated by two couples. 
The mathematical distribution of these dreadful 
groups gives an effect of frozen passion ; while the 
vigorous workmanship displays not only an enthu- 
siasm for muscular anatomy, but a real sympathy 
with blood-fury in the artist. 

There was, therefore, a certain propriety in the 
choice of Pollajuolo to cast the sepulchre of Sixtus 
IV. in bronze at Rome. The best judges complain, 
not without reason, that the allegories surrounding 
this tomb are exaggerated and affected in style ; yet 
the dead Pope, stretched in pomp upon his bier, 
commands more than merely historical interest ; 
while the figures, seated as guardians round the 
old man, terrible in death, communicate an impres- 
sion of monumental majesty. Criticised in detail, 
each separate figure may be faulty. The composi- 
tion, as a whole, is picturesque and grandiose. The 
same can scarcely be said about the tomb of Inno- 
cent VIII., erected by Antonio and his brother 
Piero del Pollajuolo. While it perpetuates the 
memory of an uninteresting Pontiff, it has but little, 
as a work of art, to recommend it. The Pollajuoli 
were not great sculptors. In the history of Italian 
art they deserve a place, because of the vivid person- 
ality impressed upon some portions of their work. 



^8 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

Few draughtsmen carried the study of muscular 
anatomy so far as Antonio.^ 

Luca della Robbia, whose life embraced the first 
eighty years of the fifteenth century, offers in many 
important respects a contrast to his contemporaries 
Ghiberti and Donatello, and still more to their im- 
mediate followers. He made his art as true to life 
as it is possible to be, without the rugged realism of 
Donatello or the somewhat effeminate graces of 
Ghiberti. The charm of his work is never im- 
paired by scientific mannerism — that stumbling-block 
to critics like De Stendhal in the art of Florence ; 
nor does it suffer from the picturesqueness of a senti- 
mental style. How to render the beauty of nature 
in her most delightful moments — taking us with him 
into the holiest of holies, and handling the sacred 
vessels with a child's confiding boldness — was a secret 
known to Luca della Robbia alone. We may well 
find food for meditation in the innocent and cheerful 
inspiration of this man, whose lifetime coincided 
with the period of sordid passions and debased ambi- 
tion in the Church and States of Italy. 

Luca was apprenticed in his youth to a gold- 
smith ; but of what he wrought before the age of 
forty-five we know but little.^ At that time his 

^ Crowe and Cavalcaselle, vol. ii. chap xvi., may be consulted as to 
the several claims of the two brothers. 

" His bass-reliefs on Giotto's campanile of Grammar, Astronomy, 



LUC A BELLA ROBBIA. 149 

faculty had attained full maturity, and he produced 
the groups of dancing children and choristers in- 
tended for the organ gallery of the Duomo. Wholly 
free from affectation, and depending for effect upon 
no merely decorative detail, these bass-reliefs deserve 
the praise bestowed by Dante on the sculpture seen 
in Purgatory:^ 

Dinanzi a noi pareva si verace, 

Quivi intagliato in un atto soave, 

Che non sembrava immagine che tace. 

Movement has never been suggested in stone 
with less exaggeration, nor have marble lips been 
made to utter sweeter and more varied music. 
Luca*s true conception of the limits to be observed 
in sculpture appears most eminently in the glazed 
tferra-cotta work by which he is best known. An 
ordinary artist might have found the temptation to 
aim at showy and pictorial effects in this material 
overwhelming. Luca restrained himself to pure white 
on pale blue, and preserved an exquisite simplicity of 
line in all his compositions. There is an almost un- 
earthly beauty in the profiles of his Madonnas, a tem- 
pered sweetness in the modulation of their drapery 
and attitude, that prove complete mastery in the art 
of rendering evanescent moments of expression, the 
most fragile subtleties of the emotions that can stir 

Geometry, Plato, Aristotle, etc., are anterior to 1445 ; and even about 
this date there is uncertainty, some authorities fixing it at 1435. 
" Purg., X. .^7 and xi. 68. 



ISO RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

a tranquil spirit. Andrea della Robbia, the nephew 
of Luca, with his four sons, Giovanni, Luca, Am- 
brogio, and Girolamo, continued to manufacture the 
glazed earthenware of Luca's invention. These men, 
though excellent artificers, lacked the fine taste of 
their teacher. Coarser colors were introduced ; the 
eye was dazzled with variety ; but the power of 
speaking to the soul as Luca spoke was lost.^ 

After the Delia Robbia's, this is the place to 
mention Agostino di Gucci or di Duccio,^ a sculp- 
tor who handled terra-cotta somewhat in the manner 
of Donatello's flat-relief, introducing more richness 
of detail, and aiming at more passion than Luca's 
taste permitted. For the oratory of S. Bernar- 
dino at Perugia he designed the fagade partly in 
stone and partly in baked clay — crowded ^ th 
figures, flying, singing, playing upon instiiime^ts 
of music, with waving draperies and windy hair, 
and the ecstasy of movement in their delicately- 
modeled limbs. If nothing else remained of Agos- 
tino's workmanship, this fagade alone would place 
him in the first rank of contemporary artists. He 
owed something, perhaps, to his material ; for terra- 

* Among the very best works of the later Robbian school may be 
cited the frieze upon the fa9ade of the Ospedale del Ceppo at Pistoja, 
representing in varied color, and with graceful vivacity, the Seven Acts 
of Mercy. Date about 1525. 

^ He calls himself Agostinus Florentinus Lapicida on his facade of 
the Oratory of S. Bernardino. 



WORK IN TERRA-COTTA. 151 

cotta has the charm of improvization. The hand, 
obedient to the brain, has made it in one moment 
what it is, and no slow hours of labor at the stone 
have dulled the first caprice of the creative fancy. 
Work, therefore, which, if translated into marble, 
might have left our sympathy unstirred, affects us 
with keen pleasure in the mold of plastic clay. 
What prodigality of thought and invention has 
been lavished on the terra-cotta models of unknown 
Italian artists! What forms and faces, beautiful 
as shapes of dreams, and, like dreams, so airy 
that we think they will take flight and vanish, 
lean to greet us from cloisters and palace fronts in 
Lombardy! To catalogue their multitude would 
be impossible. It is enough to select one instance 
out of many ; this shall be taken from the chapel 
of S. Peter Martyr in S. Eustorgio at Milan. High 
up around the cupola runs a frieze of angels, sing- 
ing together and dancing with joined hands, while 
bells composed of fruits and flowers hang down be- 
tween them. Each angel is an individual shape of 
joy ; the soul in each moves to its own deep mel- 
ody, but the music made of all is one. Their 
raiment flutters, the bells chime ; the chorus of 
their gladness falls like voices through a starlight 
heaven, half-heard in dreams and everlastingly re- 
membered. 

Four sculptors, the younger contemporaries of 



152 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY, 

Luca della Robbia, and marked by certain common 
qualities, demand attention next. All the work of 
Antonio Rossellino, Matteo Civitali, Mino da Fie- 
sole, and Benedetto da Majano is distinguished by 
sweetness, grace, tranquillity, and self-restraint — as 
though these artists had voluntarily imposed limits 
on their genius, refusing to trespass beyond a traced 
circle of religious subjects, or to aim at effects un- 
realizable by purity of outline, suavity of expres- 
sion, delicacy of feeling, and urbanity of style. 
The charm of manner they possess in common can 
scarcely be defined except by similes. The inno- 
cence of childhood, the melody of a lute or song- 
bird as distinguished from the music of an orchestra, 
the rathe tints of early dawn, cheerful light on 
shallow streams, the serenity of a simple and un- 
tainted nature that has never known the world — 
many such images occur to the mind while thinking 
of the sculpture of these men. To charge them 
with insipidity, immaturity, and monotony would be 
to mistake the force of genius and skill displayed by 
them. We should rather assume that they confined 
themselves to certain types of tranquil beauty, with- 
out caring to realize more obviously striking effects, 
and that this was their way of meeting the require- 
ments of sculpture considered as a Christian art. 
The melody of their design, meanwhile, is like 
the purest song-music of Pergolese or Salvator 



ANTONIO ROSSELLINO. 153 

Rosa, unapproachably perfect in simple outline, and 
inexhaustibly refreshing. 

Though it is possible to characterize the style of 
these sculptors by some common qualities observa- 
ble in their work, it should rather be the aim of 
criticism to point out their differences. Antonio 
Rossellino, for example, might be distinguished by 
his leaning toward the manner of Ghiberti, whose 
landscape backgrounds he has adopted in the cir- 
cular medallions of his monumental sculpture. A 
fine perception of the poetic capabilities of Christian 
art is displayed in Rossellino's idyllic treatment of 
the Nativity — the adoration of the shepherds, the 
hush of reverential stillness in the worship Mary 
pays her infant son.^ To the qualities of sweetness 
and tranquillity rare dignity is added in the monu- 
ment of the young Cardinal di Portogallo.^ The 
sublimity of the slumber that is death has never 
been more nobly and feelingly portrayed than in the 
supine figure and sleeping features of this most 
beautiful young man, who lies watched by angels 
beneath a heavy-curtained canopy. The genii of 
eternal repose modeled by Greek sculptors are 
twin-brothers of Love, on whom perpetual slumber 
has descended amid poppy-fields by Lethe's stream. 

* See especially a roundel in the Bargello, and the altar-piece in 
the church of Monte Qliveto at Naples. Those who wish to under- 
stand Rossellino should study him in the latter place. 

'^ In the church of Samminiato, near Florence. 



154 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY, 

The turmoil of the world is over for them ; they will 
never wake again ; they do not even dream. Sleep 
is the only power that still has life in them. But 
the Christian can not thus conceive the mystery of 
the soul * fallen on sleep.' His art must suggest a 
time of waiting and a time of waking ; and this it 
does partly through the ministration of attendant 
angels, who would not be standing there on guard 
if the clay-cold corpse had no futurity, partly by 
breathing upon the limbs and visage of the dead a 
spirit as of life suspended for a while. Thus the 
soul herself is imaged in the marble ' most sweetly 
slumbering in the gates of dreams.' 

What Vespasiano tells us of this cardinal, born of 
the royal house of Portugal, adds the virtue of sin- 
cerity to Rossellino's work, proving there is no flat- 
tery of the dead man in his sculpture.^ 'Among his 
other admirable virtues,' says the biographer, * Mes- 
ser Jacopo di Portogallo determined to preserve his 
virginity, though he was beautiful above all others 
of his age. Consequently he avoided all things that 
might prove impediments to his vow, such as free 
discourse, the society of women, balls, and songs. 
In this mortal flesh he lived as though he had been 
free from it — the life, we may say, rather of an angel 
than a man. And if his biography were written 
from his childhood to his death, it would be not only 

' Vite di Uomini Illustri, pp. 152-157. 



SEPULCHRAL STATUARY. 155 

an ensample, but confusion to the world. Upon his 
monument the hand was modeled from his own, 
and the face is very like him, for he was most lovely 
in his person, but still more in his soul.' 

While contemplating this monument of the 
young cardinal, we feel that the Italians of that age 
understood sepulchral sculpture far better than their 
immediate successors. They knew how to carve 
the very soul, according to the lines which our Web- 
ster, a keen observer of all things relating to the 
grave and death, has put into Jolenta's lips : 

But indeed. 
If ever I would have mine drawn to the life, 
I would have a painter steal it at such time 
I were devoutly kneeling at my prayers ; 
There is then a heavenly beauty in't ; the soul 
Moves in the superficies. 

The same Webster condemns that evil custom of 
aping life and movement on the monuments of dead 
men which began to obtain when the motives of 
pure repose had been exhausted. ' Why,' asks the 
Duchess of Malfi, * do we grow fantastical in our 
death-bed ? Do we affect fashion in the grave ? ' 
'Most ambitiously,' answers Bosola: 'princes' 
images on their tombs do not lie as they were 
wont, seeming to pray up to heaven ; but with their 
hands under their cheeks (as if they died of the 
toothache) : they are not carved with their eyes 
fixed upon the stars ; but, as their minds were 



156 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY, 

wholly bent upon the world, the self-same way they 
seem to turn their faces/ A more trenchant criti- 
cism than this could hardly have been pronounced 
upon Andrea Contucci di Monte Sansavio's tombs 
of Ascanio Sforza and Girolamo della Rovere, if 
Bosola had been standing before them in the church 
of S. Maria del Popolo when he spoke. Were it 
the function of monumental sculpture to satirize the 
dead, or to point out their characteristic faults for 
the warning of posterity, then the sepulchres of 
these worldly cardinals of Sixtus IV.'s creation 
would be artistically justified. But the object of art 
is not this. The idea of death, as conceived by 
Christians, has to be portrayed. The repose of the 
just, the resurrection of the body, and the coming 
judgment afford sufficient scope for treatment of 
good men and bad alike. Or if the sculptor have 
sublime imagination, he may, like Michael Angelo, 
suggest the alternations of the day and night, slum- 
ber and waking, whereby ' our little life is rounded 
with a sleep.' 

This digression will hardly be thought super- 
fluous when we reflect how large a part of the sculp- 
tor's energy was spent on tombs in Italy. Matteo 
Civitali of Lucca was at least Rossellino's equal in 
the sculpturesque delineation of spiritual qualities ; 
but the motives he chose for treatment were more 
varied. All his work is penetrated with deep, prayer- 



MATTEO CI VITA LI. 157 

ful, intense feeling ; as though the artist's soul, poured 
forth in ecstasy and adoration, had been given to the 
marble. This is especially true of two angels kneel- 
ing upon the altar of the Chapel of the Sacrament in 
Lucca Cathedral. Civitali, by singular good fortune, 
was chosen in the best years of his life to adorn the 
cathedral of his native city ; and it is here, rather 
than at Genoa, where much of his sculpture may 
also be seen, that he deserves to be studied. For 
the people of Lucca he designed the Chapel of the 
Santo Volto — a gem of the purest Renaissance arch- 
itecture — and a pulpit in the same style. His most 
remarkable sculpture is to be found in three monu- 
ments : the tombs of Domenico Bertini and Pietro 
da Noceto, and the altar of S. Regulus. The last 
might be chosen as an epitome of all that is most 
characteristic in Tuscan sculpture of the earlier 
Renaissance. It is built against the wall, and archi- 
tecturally designed so as to comprehend a full- 
length figure of the bishop stretched upon his bier 
and watched by angels, a group of Madonna and 
her child seated above him, a row of standing saints 
below, and a predella composed of four delicately- 
finished bass-reliefs. Every part of this complex 
work is conceived with spirit and executed with 
care ; and the various elements are so combined as 
to make one composition, the body of the saint on 



158 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

his sarcophagus forming the central object of the 
whole. 

To do more than briefly mention the minor sculp- 
tors of this group would be impossible. Mino di 
Giovanni, called Da Fiesole, was characterized by 
grace that tended to degenerate into formality. The 
tombs in the Abbey of Florence have an almost 
infantine sweetness of style, which might be ex- 
tremely piquant were it not that Mino pushed this 
quality in other works to the verge of mannerism.^ 
Their architectural features are the same as those of 
similar monuments in Tuscany: a shallow recess, 
flanked by Renaissance pilasters, and roofed with a 
semicircular arch ; within the recess, the full-length 
figure of the dead man on a marble coffin of antique 
design ; in the lunette above, a Madonna carved 
in low relief.^ Mino's bust of Bishop Salutati in 
the cathedral church of Fiesole is a powerful por- 

^ These tombs in the Badia were erected for Count Ugo, Governor 
of Tuscany under Otho II., and for Messer Bernardo Giugni. Mino 
also made the tomb for Pope Paul II., parts of which are preserved in 
the Grotte of S. Peter's. At Rome he carved a tabernacle for S. Maria 
in Trastevere, and at Volterra a ciborium for the Baptistery — one of 
his most sympathetic productions. The altars in the Baglioni Chapel 
of S. Pietro Cassinense at Perugia, in S. Ambrogio at Florence, and in 
the cathedral of Fiesole, and the pulpit in the Duomo at Prato, may 
be mentioned among his best works. 

^ Besides Civitali's altar of S. Regulus, and the tomb of Pietro da 
Noceto already mentioned, Bernardo Rossellino's monument to Lio- 
nardo Bruni, and Desiderio's monument to Carlo Marsuppini in S. 
Croce at Florence, may be cited as eminent examples of Tuscan 
sepulchres. 



MI NO AND DESIDERIO. 159 

trait, no less distinguished for vigorous indi- 
viduality than consummate workmanship. The 
wax-like finish of the finely-chiseled marble alone 
betrays that delicacy which with Mino verged 
on insipidity. The same faculty of character de- 
lineation is seen in three profiles, now in the 
Bargello Museum, attributed to Mino. They repre- 
sent Frederick Duke of Urbino, Battista Sforza, 
and Galeazzo Sforza. The relief is very low, rising 
at no point more than half an inch above the 
surface of the ground, but so carefully modulated as 
to present a wonderful variety of light and shade, 
and to render the facial expression with great 
vividness. 

Desiderio da Settignano, one of Donatello's few 
scholars, was endowed with the same gift of exqui- 
site taste as his friend Mino da Fiesole;^ but his 
inventive faculty was bolder, and his genius more 
robust, in spite of the profuse ornamentation and 
elaborate finish of his masterpiece, the tomb of 
Carlo Marsuppini in S. Croce. The bust he made 
of Marietta di Palla degli Strozzi enables us to com- 
pare his style in portraiture with that of Mino.^ It 
would be hard to find elsewhere a more captivating 

^ The wooden statue of the Magdalen in Santa Trinita at Flor- 
ence shows Desiderio's approximation to the style of his master. She 
is a careworn and ascetic saint, with the pathetic traces of great 
beauty in her emaciated face. 

^ This bust is in the Palazzo Strozzi at Florence. 



i^ RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

combination of womanly sweetness and dignity. 
We feel, in looking at these products of the best age 
of Italian sculpture, that the artists who conceived 
them were, in the truest sense of the word, gentle. 
None but men courteous and unaffected could have 
carved a face hke that of Marietta Strozzi, breathing 
the very spirit of urbanity. To express the most 
amiable qualities of a living person in a work of art 
that should suggest emotional tranquillity by harmo- 
nious treatment, and indicate the temperance of a 
disciplined nature by self-restraint and moderation 
of style, and to do this with the highest technical 
perfection, was the triumph of fifteenth-century 
sculpture. 

An artist who claims a third place beside Mino 
and his friend, * il bravo Desider si dolce e bello,' ^ 
is Benedetto da Majano. In Benedetto's bass-rehefs 
at San Gemignano, carved for the altars of those 
unlovely Tuscan worthies, S. Fina and S. Bartolo, 
we find a pictorial treatment of legendary subjects, 
proving that he had studied Ghirlandajo's frescoes. 
The same is true about his pulpit in S. Croce at 
Florence, his treatment of the story of S. Savino at 
Faenza, and his Annunciation in the church of 
Monte Oliveto at Naples. Benedetto, indeed, may 
be said to illustrate the working of Ghiberti's influ- 

^ So Giovanni Santi, Raphael's father, described Desiderio da Set- 
tignano. 



TUSCAN SCULPTURE, i6i 

ence by his liberal use of landscape and architectural 
backgrounds ; but the style is rather Ghirlandajo's 
than Ghiberti's. If it was a mistake in the sculptors 
of that period to subordinate their art to painting, 
the error, we feel, was aggravated by the imitation 
of a manner so prosaic as that of Ghirlandajo. That 
Benedetto began life as a tarsiatore may perhaps 
help to account for his pictorial style in bass-relief.^ 
In estimating his total claim as an artist, we must 
not forget that he designed the formidable and 
splendid Strozzi Palace. 

It will be observed that all the sculptors hitherto 
mentioned have been Tuscans; and this is due to 
no mere accident — nor yet to caprice on the part of 
their historian. Though the other districts of Italy 
produced admirable workmen, the direction given to 
this art proceeded from Tuscany. Florence, the 
metropolis of modern culture, determined the course 
of the aesthetical Renaissance. Even at Rimini we 
can not account for the carvings in low relief, so 
fanciful, so delicately wrought, and so profusely 
scattered over the side chapels of S. Francesco, 

* The following story is told about Benedetto's youth. He made 
two large inlaid chests or cassoni, adorned with all the skill of a 
worker in tarsia or wood-mosaic, and carried these with him to King 
Matthias Corvinus, of Hungary. Part of his journey was performed 
by sea. On arriving and unpacking his chests, he found that the sea- 
damp had unglued the fragile wood-mosaic, and all his work was 
spoiled. This determined him to practice the more permanent art of 
sculpture. See Perkins, vol. i. p. 228. 



i62 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY, 

without the intervention of two Florentines, Ber- 
nardo Ciuffagni and Donatello's pupil Simone ; while 
in the palace of Urbino we trace some hand not 
unlike that of Mino da Fiesole at work upon the 
moldings of door and architrave, cornice and high- 
built chimney.^ Not only do we thus find Tuscan 
craftsmen or their scholars employed on all the great 
public buildings throughout Italy ; but it also happens 
that, except in Tuscany, the decoration of churches 
and palaces is not unfrequently anonymous. 

This does not, however, interfere with the truth 
that sculpture, like all the arts, assumed a some- 
what different character in each Italian city. The 
Venetian stone-carvers leaned from the first to a richer 
and more passionate style than the Florentine, repro- 
ducing the types of Cima's and Bellini's paintings.^ 
Whole families, like the Bregni — classes, like 

^ For further description of the sculpture at Rimini, I may refer to 
my * Sketches in Italy and Greece,' pp. 250-252. For the student of 
Italian art who has no opportunity of visiting Riminiit is greatly to 
be regretted that these reliefs have never yet even in photography 
been reproduced. The palace of Duke Frederick at Urbino was de- 
signed by Luziano, a Dalmatian architect, and continued by Baccio 
Pontelli, a Florentine. The reliefs of dancing Cupids, white on blue 
ground, with wings and hair gilt, and the children holding pots of 
roses and gilly-flowers, in one of its great rooms, may be selected for 
special mention. Ambrogio or Ambrogino da Milano, none of whose 
handiwork is found in his native district, and who may therefore be 
supposed to have learned and practiced his art elsewhere, was the 
sculptor of these truly genial reliefs. 

' See, for example, the remarkable bass-relief of the Doge Lionardo 
Loredano, engraved by Perkins, 'Italian Sculptors,' p. 201. 



NORTH ITALIAN SCULPTURE. 165 

the Lombardi — schools, like that of Alessandro 
Leopardi, worked together on the monumental 
sculpture of S. Zanipolo. In the tombs of the 
Doges the old Pisan motive of the curtains (first 
used by Arnolfo di Cambio at Orvieto, and after- 
ward with grand effect by Giovanni Pisano at Pe- 
rugia) is expanded into a sumptuous tent-canopy. 
Pages and genii and mailed heroes take the place of 
angels, and the marine details of Roman reliefs are 
copied in the subordinate decoration. At Verona 
the mediaeval tombs of the Scaligers, with their vast 
chest-like sarcophagi and mounted warriors, exhibit 
features markedly different from the monuments of 
Tuscany ; while the mixture of fresco with sculpture, 
in monuments like that of the Cavalli in S. Anastasia, 
and in many altar-pieces, is at variance with Flor- 
entine usage. On the terra-cotta moldings, so 
frequent in Lombard cities, I have already had 
occasion to touch briefly. They almost invariably 
display a feeling for beauty more sensuous, with less 
of scientific purpose in their naturalism, than is 
common in the Tuscan style. Guido Mazzoni of 
Modena, called II Modanino, may be mentioned as 
the sculptor who freed terra-cotta from its depend- 
ence upon architecture, and who modeled groups of 
overpowering dramatic realism. His Pieta, in the 
Church of Monte Oliveto at Naples, is valu- 



1 64 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

able, less for its passionate intensity of expression 
than for the portraits of Pontano, Sannazaro, and 
Alfonso of Aragon.^ This sub-species of sculpture 
was freely employed in North Italy to stimulate 
devotion, and to impress the people with lively 
pictures of the Passion. The Sacro Monte at Va- 
rallo, for example, is covered with a multitude of 
chapels, each one of which presents some chapter 
of Bible history dramatically rendered by life-size 
groups of terra-cotta figures. Some of these were 
designed by eminent painters, and executed by clever 
modelers in clay. Even now they are scarcely less 
stirring to the mind of a devout spectator than the 
scenes of mediaeval Mystery may have been. 

The Certosa of Pavia, lastly, is the center of a 
school of sculpture that has little in common with 
the Florentine tradition. Antonio Amadeo^ and 
Andrea Fusina, acting in concert with Ambrogio 

* Another Modenese, Antonio Begarelli, born in 1479, developed 
this art of the plastzcatore, with quite as much pictorial impressiveness 
and in a style of stricter science than his predecessor II Modanino. 
His masterpieces are the * Deposition from the Cross ' in S. Francesco, 
and the ' Pieta ' in S. Pietro, of his native city. 

^ The name of this great master is variously written — Giovanni 
Antonio Amadeo, or Omodeo, or degli Amadei, or de' Madeo, or 
a Madeo — pointing possibly to the town Madeo as his native place. 
Through a long life he worked upon the fabric of the Milanese Duomo, 
the Certosa of Pavia, and the Chapel of CoUeoni at Bergamo. To 
him we owe the general design of the fagade of the Certosa and 
the cupola of the Duomo of Milan. For the details of his work 
and an estimate of his capacity, see Perkins, ' Italian Sculptors,' pp. 
127-137. 



ANTONIO AMADEO. 165 

Borgognone the painter, gave it in the fifteenth cen- 
tury that character of rich and complex decorative 
beauty which many generations of artists were des- 
tined to continue and complete. Among the count- 
less sculptors employed upon its marvelous fagade 
Amadeo asserts an individuality above the rest, 
which is further manifested in his work in the Cap- 
pella Colleoni at Bergamo. We there learn to know 
him not only as an enthusiastic cultivator of the 
mingled Christian and pagan manner of the quat- 
trocento, but as an artist in the truest sense of the 
word sympathetic. The sepulchral portrait of Medea, 
daughter of the great Condottiere, has a grace almost 
beyond that of Delia Quercia's Ilaria} Much, no 
doubt, is due to the peculiarly fragile beauty of the 
girl herself, who lies asleep with little crisp curls 
clustering upon her forehead, and with a string of 
pearls around her slender throat. But the sensibility 
to loveliness so delicate, and the power to render 
it in marble with so ethereal a touch upon the rigid 
stone, belong to the sculptor, and win for him our 
worship. 

The list of fifteenth-century sculptors is almost 
ended ; and already, on the threshold of the six- 

This statue was originally intended for a chapel built and en- 
dowed by Colleoni at Basella, near Bergamo. When he determined 
to erect his chapel in S. Maria Maggiore at Bergamo, he intrusted 
the execution of this new work to Amadeo, and the monunient of 
Medea was subsequently placed there. 



i66 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

teenth, stands the mighty form of Michael Angela 
Andrea Contucci da Sansavino and his pupil Jacopo 
Tatti, called also Sansovino, after his master, must, 
however, next be mentioned as continuing the Flor- 
entine tradition without subservience to the style of 
Buonarroti. Andrea da Sansavino was a sculptor in 
whom for the first time the faults of the mid- Renais- 
sance period are glaringly apparent. He persistently 
sacrificed simplicity of composition to decorative 
ostentation, and tranquillity of feeling to theatrical 
effect. The truth of this will be acknowledged by 
all who have studied the tombs of the cardinals in 
S. Maria del Popolo already mentioned,^ and the 
bass-reliefs upon the Santa Casa at Loreto. In tech- 
nical workmanship Andrea proved himself an able 
craftsman, modeling marble with the plasticity of 
wax, and lavishing patterns of the most refined in- 
vention. Yet the decorative prodigaHty of this 
master corresponded to the frigid and stylistic graces 
of the neo-Latin poets. It was so much mannerism 
— adopted without real passion from the antique, and 
applied with a rhetorical intention. Those acanthus 
scrolls and honeysuckle borders, in spite of their 
consummate finish, fail to arrest attention, leaving 
the soul as unstirred as the Ovidian cadences of 
Bembo. 

* See above, p. 1 56. I have spelt the name Sansovino, when 
applied to Jacopo Tatti, in accordance with time-honored usage. 



JACOPO SANSOVINO. 167 

Jacopo Tatti was a genius of more distinction. 
Together with San Gallo and Bramante he studied the 
science of architecture in Rome, where he also worked 
at the restoration of newly-discovered antiques, 
and cast in bronze a copy of the Laocoon. Thus 
equipped with the artistic learning of his age, he 
was called in 1523 by the Doge, Andrea Gritti, to 
Venice. The material pomp of Venice at this epoch, 
and the pride of her unrivaled luxury, affected his 
imagination so powerfully that his genius, tutored by 
Florentine and Umbrian masters among the ruins 
of old Rome, became at once Venetian. In the 
history of the Renaissance the names of Titian and 
Aretino, themselves acclimatized aliens, are insep- 
arably connected with that of their friend San- 
sovino. At Venice he lived until his death in 1570, 
building the Zecca, the library, the Scala d'Oro in 
the Ducal Palace, and the Loggietta beneath the 
bell-tower of S. Mark. In all his work he sub- 
ordinated sculpture to architecture, and his statuary 
is conceived in the brav7ira manner of Renaissance 
paganism. Whatever may be the faults of Sansovino 
in both arts, it can not be denied that he expressed, 
in a style peculiar to himself, the large voluptuous ex- 
ternal life of Venice at a moment when this city was 
the Paris or the Corinth of Renaissance Eu>-ope. 
At the same time, the shallowness of Sansovmo's 
inspiration as a sculptor is patent in his masterpieces 



i68 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

of parade — ^the Neptune and the Mars, guarding the 
Sala d'Oro. Separated from the architecture of 
the court and staircase, they are insignificant in spite 
of their colossal scale. In their place they add a 
haughty grandeur, by the contrast which their flow- 
ing forms and arrogant attitudes present to the 
severer lines of the construction. But they are 
devoid of artistic sincerity, and occupy the same 
relation to true sculpture as flourishes of rhetoric, 
however brilliant, to poetry embodying deep thought 
or passion. At first sight they impose : on further 
acquaintance we find them chiefly interesting as 
illustrations of a potent civic life upon the wane, 
gorgeous in its decay. 

Sansovino was a first-rate craftsman. The most 
finished specimen of his skill is the bronze door of 
the Sacristy of S. Marco, upon which he is said to 
have worked through twenty years. Portraits of 
the sculptor, Titian, and Pietro Aretino are intro- 
duced into the decorative border. These heads start 
from the surface of the gate with astonishing vivacity. 
That Aretino should thus daily assist in effigy at 
the procession of priests bearing the sacred em- 
blems from the sacristy to the high altar of S. Mark 
is one of the most characteristic proofs of sixteenth- 
century indifference to things holy and things pro- 
fane. 

Jacopo Sansovino marks the final intrusion of 



INTRUSION OF PAGANISM. 169 

paganism into modern art. The classical revival 
had worked but partially and indirectly upon Ghi- 
berti and Donatello — not because they did not feel 
it most intensely, but because they clung to nature 
far more closely than to antique precedent. This 
enthusiasm inspired Sansovino with the best and 
strongest qualities that he can boast; and if his 
genius had been powerful enough to resist the fasci- 
nation of merely rhetorical effects, he might have 
produced a perfect restoration of the classic style. 
His was no lifeless or pedantic imitation of antique 
fragments, but a real expression of the fervor with 
which the modern world hailed the discoveries re- 
vealed to it by scholarship. This is said advisedly. 
The most beautiful and spirited pagan statue of the 
Renaissance period, justifying the estimate here 
made of Sansovino's genius, is the Bacchus exhibited 
in the Bargello Museum. Both the Bacchus and the 
Satyriscus at his side are triumphs of realism, irra- 
diated and idealized by the sculptor's vivid sense of 
natural gladness. Considered as a restitution of the an- 
tique manner, this statue is even superior to the Bac- 
chus of Michael Angelo. While the mundane splen- 
dor of Venice gave body and fullness to Sansovino's 
paganism, he missed the self-restraint and purity of 
taste peculiar to the studious shades of Florence. In 
his style, both architectural and sculptural, the neo- 
pagan sensuality of Italy expanded all its bloom- 



I70 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

For the artist at this period a Greek myth and a 
Christian legend were all one. Both afforded the 
occasion for displaying technical skill in fluent forms, 
devoid of any but voluptuous feeling ; while both 
might be subordinated to rich effects of decoration.^ 
To this point the intellectual culture of the fifteenth 
century had brought the plastic arts of Italy, by a 
process similar to that which ended in the Partus 
Virginis of Sannazaro. They were still indisputably 
vigorous, and working in accordance with the move- 
ment of the modern spirit. Yet the synthesis they at- 
tempted to effect between heathenism and Christi- 
anity, by a sheer effort of style, and by indifferentism, 
strikes us from the point of view of art alone, not 
reckoning religion or morality, as unsuccessful. Still, 
if it be childish on the one hand to deplore that the 
Christian earnestness of the earlier masters had failed, 
it would be even more ridiculous to complain that 
paganism had not been more entirely recovered. The 
double mind of the Renaissance, the source of its 
weakness in art as in thought, could not be avoided, 
because humanity at this moment had to lose the 
mediaeval sincerity of faith, and to assimilate the 
spirit of a bygone civilization. This, for better or for 
worse, was the phase through which the intellect of 



' To multiply instances is tedious ; but notice in this connection 
the Hermaphroditic statue of S. Sebastian at Orvieto, near the western 
door. It is a fair work of Lo Scalza. 



MICHAEL ANGELO. 171 

modern Europe was obliged to pass ; and those who 
have confidence in the destinies of the human race 
will not spend their strength in moaning over such 
shortcomings as the periods of transition bring inevi- 
tably with them. The student of ItaHan history may 
indeed more reasonably be allowed to question 
whether the arts, if left to follow their own develop- 
ment unchecked, might not have recovered from the 
confusion of the Renaissance and have entered on a 
stage of nobler activity through earnest and unaf- 
fected study of nature. But the enslavement of the 
country, together with the counter-Reformation, sus- 
pended the Renaissance in mid-career ; and what 
remains of Italian art is incomplete. Besides, it 
must be borne in mind that the confusion of opinions 
consequent upon the clash of the modern with the 
ancient world left no body of generally accepted 
beliefs to express ; nor has the time even yet arrived 
for a settlement and synthesis that shall be favorable 
to the activity of the figurative arts. 

Sansovino himself was neither original nor power- 
ful enough to elevate the mixed motives of Renais- 
sance sculpture by any lofty idealization. To do 
that remained for Michael Angelo. The greatness 
of Michael Angelo consists in this — that while 
literature was sinking into the frivolity of Academies 
and the filth of the Bernesque Capitoli, while the 
bare-faced villainies of Aretino won him credit, while 



172 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY, 

sensual magnificence formed the ideal of artists who 
were neither Greeks nor Christians, while Ariosto 
found no subject fitter for his genius than a glittering 
romance, he and he alone maintained the Dantesque 
dignity of the Italian intellect in his sculpture. 
Michael Angel o stands so far apart from other men, 
and is so gigantic a force for good and evil in the 
history of art, that to estimate his life and labor in 
relation to the Renaissance must form the subject 
of a separate chapter. For the present it is enough 
to observe that his immediate scholars, Raffaello da 
Montelupo and Gian Angelo Montorsoli, caught 
little from their master but the mannerism of con- 
torted form and agitated action. This mannerism, 
a blemish even in the strong work of Buonarroti, 
became ridiculous when adopted by men of feeble 
powers and passionless imagination. By straining 
the art of sculpture to its utmost limits, Michael 
Angelo expressed vehement emotions in marble ; and 
the forced attitudes affected in his work had their 
value as significant of spiritual struggle. His imita- 
tors showed none of their master's sublime force, none 
of that terribilita which made him unapproachable 
in social intercourse and inimitable in art. They 
merely fancied that dignity and beauty were to be 
achieved by placing figures in difficult postures, ex- 
aggerating muscular anatomy, and twisting the limbs 
of their models upon sections of ellipses in uncom- 



BANDINELLI AND AMMAN ATI. 173 

fortable attitudes, till the whole of their work was 
writhen into uncouth lines. Buonarroti himself was 
not responsible for these results. He wrought out his 
own ideal with the firmness of a genius that obeys 
the law of its own nature, doing always what it must. 
That the decadence of sculpture into truculent bra- 
vado was independent of his direct influence is 
further proved by the inefficiency of his contem- 
poraries. 

Baccio Bandinelli and Bartolommeo Ammanati 
filled the squares of the Italian cities with statues of 
Hercules and satyrs, Neptune and river-gods. We 
know not whether to select the vulgarity, the feeble- 
ness, or the pretentiousness of these pseudo-clas- 
sical colossi for condemnation. They have nothing 
Greek about them but their names, their nakedness, 
and their association with myths the significance 
whereof was never really felt by the sculptors. 
Some of Bandinelli's designs, it is true, are vigorous ; 
but they are mere drawings from un draped peasants, 
life studies depicting the human animal. His Her- 
cules and CacuSy while it deserves all the sarcasm 
hurled at it by Cellini, proves that Bandinelli could 
not rise above the wrestling bout of a porter and a 
coal-heaver. Nor would it be possible to invent a 
motive less in accordance with Greek taste than the 
conceit of Ammanati's fountain at Castello, where 
Hercules by squeezing the body of Antaeus makes 



174 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

the drinking-water of a city spout from a giant's 
mouth. Such pitiful misapplications of an art which 
is designed to elevate the commonplace of human 
form, and to render permanent the nobler qualities 
of physical existence, shows how superficially and 
wrongly the antique spirit had been apprehended. 

Some years before his death Ammanati ex- 
pressed in public his regret that he had made so 
many giants and satyrs, feeling that, by exhibiting 
forms of lust, brutality, and animalism to the gaze of his 
fellow-countrymen, he had sinned against the higher 
law revealed by Christianity. For a Greek artist to 
have spoken thus would have been impossible. The 
Faun, the Titan, and the Satyr had a meaning for 
him, which he sought to set forth in accordance with 
the semi-religious, semi-poetical traditions of his race ; 
and when he was at work upon a myth of nature- 
forces, he well knew that at the other end of the 
scale, separated by no spiritual barrier, but removed 
to an almost infinite distance of refinement, Zeus, 
Phoebus, and Pallas claimed his loftier artistic in- 
spiration. Ammanati's confession, on the contrary, 
betrays that schism between the conscience of Chris- 
tianity and the lusts let loose by ill-assimilated 
sympathy with antique heathenism which was a 
marked characteristic of the Renaissance. The 
coarser passions, held in check by ecclesiastical dis- 
cipline, dared to emerge into the light of day under 



LOIV LEVEL OF RENAISSANCE PAGANISM. 175 

the supposed sanction of classical examples. What 
the Visconti and the Borgias practiced in their secret 
chambers, the sculptors exposed in marble and the 
poets in verse. All alike, however, were mistaken 
in supposing that antique precedent sanctioned this 
efflorescence of immorality. No amount of Greek 
epigrams by Strato and Meleager, nor all the Her- 
maphrodites and Priapi of Rome, had power to annul 
the law of conduct established by the founders of 
Christianity, and ratified by the higher instincts of 
the Middle Ages. Nor again were artists justified 
before the bar of conscience in selecting the baser 
elements of paganism for imitation, instead of aiming 
at Greek self-restraint and Roman strength of char- 
acter. All this the men of the Renaissance felt 
when they listened to the voice within them. Their 
work, therefore, in so far as it pretended to be a 
reconstruction of the antique, was false. The sen- 
suality it shared in common with many Greek and 
Roman masterpieces had ceased to be frank and in 
the true sense pagan. To shake off Christianity, 
and to revert with an untroubled conscience to the 
manners of a bygone age, was what they could 
not do. 

The errors I have attempted to characterize did 
not, however, prevent the better and more careful 
works of sculpture, executed in illustration of classical 
mythology, from having a true value. The Perseus 



176 l^ENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

of Cellini and some of Gian Bologna's statues belong 
to a class of aesthetic productions which show how 
much that is both original and excellent may be 
raised in the hotbed of culture.^ They express a 
genuine moment of the Renaissance with vigor, 
and deserve to be ranked with the Latin poetry of 
Poliziano, Bembo, and Pontano. The worst that 
can be said of them is that their inspiration was 
factitious, and that their motives had been handled 
better in the age of Greek sincerity. 

Gian Bologna, born at Douai, but a Florentine 
by education, devoted himself almost exclusively to 
mythological sculpture. That he was a greater 
sculptor than his immediate predecessors will be 
affirmed by all who have studied his bronze Mer* 
cury, the Venus of Petraja, and the Neptune on the 
fountain of Perugia. Something of the genuine 
classic feeling had passed into his nature. The 
Mercury is not a reminiscence of any antique statue. 
It gives in bronze a faithful and spirited reading of 
Virgil's lines, and is conceived with artistic purity 
not unworthy of a good Greek period. The Nep- 
tune is something more than a muscular old man ; 
and, in its place, it forms one of the most striking 
ornaments of Italy. It is worthy of remark that 
sculpture, in this stage, continued to be decorative. 

^ This brief allusion to Cellini must suffice for the moment, as I 
intend to treat of him in a separate chapter. 



RETROSPECT, 177 

Fountains are among the most successful monu- 
ments of the late Renaissance. Even Montorsoli's 
fountain at Messina is in a high sense picturesquely 
beautiful. 

Casting a glance backward over the foregoing 
sketch of Italian sculpture, it will be seen that three 
distinct stages were traversed in the evolution of 
this art. The first may be called architectural, the 
second pictorial, the third neo-pagan. Defined by 
their artistic purposes, the first idealizes Christian 
motives; the second is naturalistic; the third at- 
tempts an idealization inspired by revived paganism. 
As far as the Renaissance is concerned, all three are 
moments in its history ; though it was only during the 
third that the influences of the classical revival made 
themselves overwhelmingly felt. Niccola Pisano in 
the first stage marked a fresh point of departure 
for his art by a return to Grseco-Roman standards 
of the purest type then attainable, in combination 
with the study of nature. Giovanni Pisano effected a 
fusion between his father's manner and the Gothic 
style. The Pisan sculpture was wholly Christian ; 
nor did it attempt to free itself from the service of 
architecture. Giotto opened the second stage by 
introducing new motives, employed by him with 
paramount mastery in painting. Under his influence 
the sculptors inclined to picturesque effects, and the 
direction thus given to sculpture lasted through the 



178 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY, 

fifteenth century. For the rest, the style of these 
masters was distinguished by a fresh and charming 
naturalism, and by rapid growth in technical pro- 
cesses. While assimilating much of the classical 
spirit, they remained on the whole Christian ; and 
herein they were confirmed by the subjects they 
were chiefly called upon to treat, in the decoration 
of altars, pulpits, church fagades, and tombs. The 
revived interest in antique literature widened their 
sympathies and supplied their fancy with new mate- 
rial ; but there is no imitative formalism in their 
work. Its beauty consists in a certain immature 
blending of motives chosen almost indiscriminately 
from Christian and pagan mythology, vitalized by 
the imagination of the artist, and presented with the 
originality of true creative instinct. During the 
third stage the results of prolonged and almost 
exclusive attention to the classics, on the part of 
the Italians as a people, make themselves manifest. 
Collections of antiquities and libraries had been 
formed in the fifteenth century ; the literary ener- 
gies of the nation were devoted to the interpretation 
of Greek and Latin texts, and the manners of 
society affected paganism. At the same time a 
worldly Church and a corrupt hierarchy had done 
their utmost to enfeeble the spirit of Christianity. 
That art should prove itself sensitive to this phase 
of intellectual and social life was natural. Religrious 



THE DOUBLE MIND OF THE RENAISSANCE. 179 

subjects were now treated by the sculptors with 
superficial formalism and cynical indifference, while 
all their ingenuity was bestowed upon providing 
pagan myths with new forms. How far they suc- 
ceeded has been already made the matter of inquiry. 
The most serious condemnation of art in this third 
period is that it halted between two opinions, that it 
could not be sincere. But this double-mindedness, 
as I have tried to show, was necessary ; and there- 
fore to lament over it is weak. What the Renais- 
sance achieved for the modern world was the libera- 
tion of the reason, the power of starting on a new 
career of progress. The false direction given to the 
art of sculpture at one moment of this intellectual 
revival may be deplored ; and still more deplorable 
is the corresponding sensual debasement of the race 
who won for us the possibility of freedom. But the 
life of humanity is long and vigorous, and the phi- 
losopher of history knows well that the sum total of 
accomplishment at any time must be diminished by 
an unavoidable discount. The Renaissance, like a 
man of genius, had the defects of its qualities. 



CHAPTER IV. 

PAINTING. 

Distribution of Artistic Gifts in Italy — F lorence and Venice — Classi- 
fication by Schools — Stages in the Eve lution of Painting — Cimabue 
— The Rucellai Madonna — Giotto — His widespread Activity — The 
Scope of his Art — Vitality — Composition — Color — Naturalism — 
Healthiness — Frescoes at Assisi and Padua — Legend of S. Francis 
— The Giotteschi — Pictures of the Last Judgment — Orcagna in the 
Strozzi Chapel — Ambrogio Lorenzetti at Pisa — Dogmatic Theol- 
ogy — Capella degli Spagnuoli — Traini's ' Triumph of S. Thomas 
Aquinas * — Political Doctrine expressed in Fresco — Sala della Pace 
at Siena — Religious Art in Siena and Perugia — The Relation of 
the Giottesque Painters to the Renaissance. 

It is the duty of the historian of painting to trace 
the beginnings of art in each of the Itahan commu- 
nities, to differentiate their local styles, and to ex- 
plain their mutual connections. For the present 
generation this work is being done with all-sufiicient 
thoroughness and accuracy.^ The historian of cul- 
ture, on the other hand, for whom the arts form one 
important branch of intellectual activity, may dispense 
with these detailed inquiries, and may endeavor to 
seize the more general outlines of the subject. He 
need not weigh in balances the claims of rival cities 

' In the * History of Painting in Italy/ by Messrs^ CsKJwe and 
Cavalcaselle. 



TUSCANY, UMBRIA, VENICE. i8i 

to priority, nor hamper his review of national pro- 
gress by discussing the special merits of the several 
schools. Still there are certain broad facts about the 
distribution of artistic gifts in Italy which it is neces- 
sary to bear in mind. However much we may 
desire to treat of painting as a phase of national 
and not of merely local life, the fundamental 
difficulty of Italian history, its complexity and va- 
riety, owing to the subdivisions of the nation into 
divers states, must here as elsewhere be acknowl- 
edged. To deny that each oi the Italian centers 
had its own strong personality in art — that painting, 
as practiced in Genoa or Naples, differed from the 
painting of Ferrara or Urbino — would be to contra- 
dict a law that has been over and over again insisted 
upon already in these volumes. 

The broad outlines of the subject can be briefly 
stated. Surveying the map of Italy, we find that 
we may eliminate from our consideration the north- 
western and the southern provinces. Not from 
Piedmont nor from Liguria, not from Rome nor 
from the extensive kingdom of Naples, does Italian 
painting take its origin, or at any period derive im- 
portant contributions.^ Lombardy, with the excep- 

* Nothing is more astonishing than the sterility of Genoa and of 
Rome. Neither in sculpture nor in painting did these cities produce 
any thing memorable, though Genoa was well placed for receiving the 
influences of Pisa, and had the command of the marble quarries of 
Carrara, while Rome was the resort of all the art-students of Italy. 



i82 RENAISSANCE IN ITAL Y. 

tion of Venice, is comparatively barren of originative 
elements.^ To Tuscany, to Umbria, and to Venice, 
roughly speaking, are due the really creative forces 
of Italian painting; and these three districts were 
marked by strong peculiarities. In art, as in politics, 
Florence and Venice exhibit distinct types of char- 
acter. ^ The Florentines developed fresco, and 
devoted their genius to the expression of thought 
by scientific design. The Venetians perfected oil- 
painting, and set forth the glory of the world as it 
appeals to the imagination and the senses. The art 
of Florence may seem to some judges to savor 
overmuch of intellectual dryness ; the art of Venice, 
in the apprehension of another class of critics, offers 
something overmuch of material richness. More 
allied to the Tuscan than to the Venetian spirit, the 
Umbrian masters produced a style of genuine 
originality. The cities of the Central Apennines 
owed their specific quality of religious fervor to the 
influences emanating from Assisi, the head-quarters 
of the cultus of S. Francis. The pietism, nowhere 

The very early eminence of Apulia in architecture and the plastic arts 
led to no results. 

^ Milan, it is true, produced a brilliant school of sculptors, and the 
Certosa of Pavia is a monument of her spontaneous artistic genius. 
But in painting, until the date of Lionardo's advent, she achieved 
little. 

'See 'Age of the Despots,' pp. 221-236, for the constitutional 
characteristics of Florence and Venice ; and ' Revival of Learning,' 
pp. 162-165, for the intellectual supremacy of Florence. 



LOMBARD Y AND ROME. 183 

else SO paramount, except for a short period in Siena, 
constitutes the individuality of Umbria. 

With regard to the rest of Italy, the old custom 
of speaking about schools and places, instead of 
signalizing great masters, has led to misconception, 
by making it appear that local circumstances were 
more important than the facts justify. We do not 
find elsewhere what we find in Tuscany, in Umbria, 
and in Venice — a definite quality, native to the 
district, shared through many generations by all its 
painters, and culminating in a few men of command- 
ing genius. When, for instance, we speak of the 
School of Milan, what we mean is the continuation 
through Lionardo da Vinci and his pupils of the 
Florentine tradition, as modified by him and intro- 
duced into the Lombard capital. That a special » 
style was developed by Luini," Ferrari, and other 
artists of the Milanese duchy, so that their man- 
ner differs essentially from that of Parma and 
Cremona, does not invalidate the importance of 
this fact about its origin. The name of Roman 
School, again, has been given to Raphael and Michael 
Angelo together with their pupils. The truth is that 
Rome, for one brief period, during the pontificates 
of Julius and Leo, was the focus of Italian intellect. 
Allured by the patronage of the Papal Curia, not 
only artists, but scholars and men of letters, flocked 
from all the cities of Italy to Rome, where they 



l84 RENAISSANCE IN ITAL V, 

found a nobler sphere for the exercise of their facul- 
ties than elsewhere. But Rome, while she lent her 
imperial quality of grandeur to the genius of her 
aliens, was in no sense originative. Rome produced 
no first-rate master from her own children, if we 
except Giulio Romano. The title of originality is 
due rather to Padua, the birthplace of Mantegna, 
or to Parma, the city of Correggio, whose works 
display independence of either Florentine or Vene- 
tian traditions. Yet these great masters were 
isolated, neither expressing in any definite form the 
character of their districts nor founding a succes- 
sion of local artists. Their influence was incontes- 
tably great, but widely diffused. Bologna and Fer- 
rara, Brescia and Bergamo, Cremona and Verona, 
have excellent painters ; and it is not difficult to 
show that in each of these cities art assumed specific 
characters. Yet the interest of the schools in these 
towns is due mainly to the varied influences brought 
to bear upon them from Venice, Umbria, and Milan. 
In other words, they are affiliated, each according to 
its geographical position, to the chief originative 
centers. 

What I have advanced in the foregoing para- 
graphs is not meant for a polemic against the time- 
honored division of Italian painters into local 
schools, but for a justification of my own proposed 
method of treatment. Having undertaken to deal 



RELATION OF PAINTING TO CULTURE. 185 

with painting as the paramount art-product of the 
Renaissance, it will be my object to point out the 
leading characteristics of aesthetic culture in Italy, 
rather than to dwell upon its specific differences. 
The Venetian painters I intend to reserve for a 
separate chapter, devoting this and the two next to 
the general history of the art as developed in Tus- 
cany and propagated by Tuscan influences.^ In 
pursuing this plan I shall endeavor to show how 
the successive stages in the evolution of Italian 
painting corresponded to similar stages in the his- 
tory of the Renaissance. Beginning as the hand- 
maid of the Church, and stimulated by the enthu- 
siasm of the two great popular monastic orders, 
painting was at first devoted to embodying the 
thoughts of mediaeval Christianity. In proportion 
as the painters fortified themselves by study of the 

* A glance at the map shows to what a large extent the Italians 
owed the progress of their arts to Tuscany. Pisa, as we have already 
seen, took the lead in sculpture. Florence, at a somewhat later period, 
revived painting, while Siena contemporaneously developed a style 
peculiar to herself. This Sienese style — thoroughly Tuscan, though 
different from that of Florence — exercised an important influence over 
the schools of Umbria, and gave a peculiar quality to Perugian 
painting. Through Piero della Francesca, a native of Borgo San 
Sepolcro, the Florentine tradition was extended to Umbria and the 
Roman States. Perugia might be even geographically claimed for 
Tuscany, inasmuch as the Tiber divides the old Etrurian territory 
from the Umbrians and the duchy of Spoleto. Lionardo was a Tuscan' 
settled as an alien in Milan. Raphael, though a native of Urbino, 
derived his training from Florence, indirectly through his father 
and his master Perugino, more immediately from Fra Bartolommeo 
and Michael Angelo. 



1 86 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY, 

natural world, their art became more secular. Mys- 
ticism gave way to realism. It was felt that much 
besides religious sentiment was worthy of expression. 
At the same time, about the year 1440, this pro- 
cess of secularization was hastened by the influences 
of the classical revival, renewing an interest in the 
past life of humanity, and stirring a zeal for science. 
The painters, on the one hand, now aimed at accu- 
rate delineation of actual things : good perspective, 
correct drawing, sound portraiture, occupied their 
attention, to the exclusion of more purely spiritual 
motives. On the other hand they conceived an 
admiration for the fragments of the newly-discovered 
antiques, and felt the plastic beauty of Hellenic 
legends. It is futile to attempt, as M. Rio has done, 
to prove that this abandonment of the religious 
sphere of earlier art was for painting a plain decline 
from good to bad, or to make the more or less of 
spiritual feeling in a painter's style the test of his 
degree of excellence ; nor can we by any sophistries 
be brought to beheve that the Popes of the fifteenth 
century were pastoral protectors of solely Christian 
arts. The truth is, that in the Church, in politics, 
and in society, the fifteenth century witnessed a sen- 
sible decrease of religious fervor, and a very con- 
siderable corruption of morality. Painting felt this 
change ; and the secularization, which was inevitable, 
passed onward into paganism. Yet the art itself 



CIMABUES MADONNA. 187 

can not be said to have suffered, when on the thresh- 
old of the sixteenth century stand the greatest 
painters whom the world has known — neither Catho- 
lics nor heathens, but, in their strength of full accom- 
plished art and science, human. After Italy, in the 
course of that century, had been finally enslaved, 
then, and not till then, painting suffered from the 
general depression of the national genius. The 
great luminaries were extinguished one by one, till 
none were left but Michael Angelo in Rome, and 
Tintoret in Venice. The subsequent history of 
Italian painting is occupied with its revival under the 
influences of the Counter Reformation, when a new 
religious sentiment, emasculated and ecstatic, was ex- 
pressed in company with crude naturalism and cruel 
sensualism by Bolognese and Neapolitan painters. 

I need scarcely repeat the tale of Cimabue's 
picture, visited by Charles of Anjou, and borne 
in triumph through the streets with trumpeters, be- 
neath a shower of garlands, to S. Maria Novella.^ 
Yet this was the birthday festival of nothing less 
than what the world now values as Italian painting. 
In this public act of joy the people of Florence 

^ If Vasari is to be trusted, this visit of Charles of Anjou to 
Cimabue's studio took place in 1267; but neither the Malespini nor 
Villani mention it, and the old belief that the Borgo Allegri owed 
its name to the popular rejoicing at that time is now somewhat dis- 
credited. See Vasari, Le Monnier, 1846, vol. i. p. 225, note 4. Gino 
Capponi, in his ' Storia della Repubblica di Firenze,' vol. i. p. 157, 
refuses, however, to reject the legend. 



i88 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY, 

recognized and paid enthusiastic honor to the art 
arisen among them from the dead. If we rightly 
consider the matter, it is not a little wonderful that 
a whole community should thus have hailed the pres- 
ence in their midst of a new spirit of power and 
beauty. It proves the widespread sensibility of the 
Florentines to things of beauty, and shows the sym- 
pathy which, emanating from the people, was des- 
tined to inspire and brace the artist for his work.^ 

In a dark transept of S. Maria Novella, raised 
by steps above the level of the church, still hangs 
this famous Madonna of the Rucellai — not far, per- 
haps, from the spot where Boccaccio's youths and 
maidens met that Tuesday morning in the year of 
the great plague; nor far, again, from where the 
solitary woman, beautiful beyond belief, conversed 
with Machiavelli on the morning of the first of May 
in 1527.^ We who can call to mind the scenes that 
picture has looked down upon — we who have studied 
the rise and decadence of painting throughout Italy 
from this beginning even to the last work of the 
latest Bolognese — may do well to visit it with rever- 
ence, and to ponder on the race of mighty masters 
whose lineage here takes its origin. 

Cimabue did not free his style from what are 

* See Capponi, vol. i. pp. 59, 78, for a description of the gay and 
courteous living of the Florentines upon the end of the thirteenth 
century. 

^ See the ' Descrizione della Peste di Firenze.* 



CIMABUE AND GIOTTO. 189 

called Byzantine or Romanesque mannerisms. To 
unpracticed eyes his saints and angels, with their stiff 
draperies and angular attitudes, though they exhibit 
stateliness and majesty, belong to the same tribe as 
the grim mosaics and gaunt frescoes of his predeces- 
sors. It is only after careful comparison that we 
discover, in this picture of the Rucellai, for example, 
a distinctly fresh ejideavor to express emotion and 
to depict life. The outstretched arms of the infant 
Christ have been copied from nature, not merely 
borrowed from tradition. The six kneeling angels 
display variety of attitude suited to several shades 
of devout affection and adoring service. The heaa 
of the Madonna, heavy as it is and conventional in 
type, still strives to represent maternal affection 
mingled with an almost melancholy reverence. Pro- 
longing our study, we are led to ask whether the 
painter might not have painted more freely had he 
chosen — whether, in fact, he was not bound down to 
the antique mode of presentation consecrated by 
devout tradition. This question occurs with even 
greater force before the wall-paintings ascribed to 
Cimabue in the church of S. Francis at Assisi. 

It remained for Giotto Bondone, born at Ves- 
pignano in 1276, just at the date of Niccola Pisano*s 
death, to carry painting in his lifetime even further 
than the Pisan sculptor had advanced the sister art. 
Cimabue, so runs a legend luckily not yet dis- 



190 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

credited, found the child Giotto among the sheep- 
folds on the solemn Tuscan hill-side, drawing with 
boyish art the outline of a sheep upon a stone.^ 
The master recognized his talent, and took him 
from his father's cottage to the Florentine bottega, 
much as young Haydn was taken by Renter to S. 
Stephen's at Vienna. Gifted with a large and com- 
prehensive intellect, capable of sustained labor, and 
devoted with the unaffected zeal of a good crafts- 
man to his art, Giotto, in the course of his long 
career, filled Italy with work that taught succeeding 
centuries of painters. As we travel from Padua in 
the north, where his Arena Chapel sets forth the 
legend of Mary and the life of Christ in a series of 
incomparable frescoes, southward to Naples, where 
he adorned the Convent of S. Chiara, we meet with 
Giotto in almost every city. The Passion of our 
Lord 2indi the Allegories of S. Francis were painted 
by him at Assisi. S. Peter's at Rome still shows 
his mosaic of the Ship of the Churcho Florence 
raises his wonderful bell-tower, that lily among 
campanih, to the sky; and preserves two chapels 
of S. Croce, illuminated by him with paintings 
from the stories of S. Francis and S. John. In the 

* I wish I could here transcribe the most beautiful passage from 
Ruskin's 'Giotto and his Works in Padua,' pp. ii, 12, describing the 
contrast between the landscape of Valdarno and the landscape of the 
hills of the Mugello district. I can only refer readers to the book, 
printed for the Arundel Society, 1854. 



GIOTTO'S TRUTH TO NATURE. 191 

chapel of the Podesta he drew the portraits of 
Dante, Brunetto Latini, and Charles of Valois. And 
these are but a tithe of his productions. Nothing, 
indeed, in the history of art is more remarkable than 
the fertility of this originative genius, no less indus- 
trious in labor than fruitful of results for men who 
followed him. The sound common sense, the genial 
temper, and the humor of the man, as we learn to 
know him in tales made current by Vasari and the 
novelists, help to explain how he achieved so much, 
with energy so untiring and with excellence so even. 

It is no exaggeration to say that Giotto and his 
scholars, within the space of little more than half a 
century, painted out upon the walls of the churches 
and public palaces of Italy every great conception of 
the Middle Ages. And this they achieved without 
ascetic formalism, energetically, but always rev- 
erently, aiming at expressing life and dramatizing 
Scripture history. The tale told about Giotto's first 
essay in drawing might be chosen as a parable : he 
was not found beneath a church roof tracing a mo- 
saic, but on the open mountain, trying to draw the 
portrait of the living thing committed to his care. 

What, therefore, Giotto gave to art was, before 
:ill things else, vitality. His Madonnas are no 
longer symbols of a certain phase of pious awe, but 
pictures of maternal love. The Bride of God 
suckles her divine infant with a smile, watches him 



192 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY, 

playing with a bird, or stretches out her arms to 
take him when he turns crying from the hands of 
the circumcising priest. By choosing incidents like 
these from real home-life, Giotto, through his paint- 
ing, humanized the mysteries of faith, and brought 
them close to common feeling. Nor was the change 
less in his method than his motives. Before his day 
painting had been without composition, without 
charm of color, without suggestion of movement or 
the play of living energy. He first knew how to 
distribute figures in the given space with perfect 
balance, and how to mass them together in animated 
groups agreeable to the eye. He caught varied and 
transient shades of emotion, and expressed them 
by the posture of the body and the play of feature. 
The hues of morning and of evening served him. 
Of all painters he was most successful in preserving 
the clearness and the light of pure, well-tempered 
colors. His power of telling a story by gesture 
and action is unique in its peculiar simplicity. There 
are no ornaments or accessories in his pictures. The 
whole force of the artist has been concentrated on 
rendering the image of the life conceived by him. 
Relying on his knowledge of human nature, and 
seeking only to make his subject intelligible, no 
painter is more unaffectedly pathetic, more uncon- 
sciously majestic. While under the influence of his 
genius, we are sincerely glad that the requisite 



GIOTTO'S GIFT OF LIFE. 193 

science for clever imitation of landscape and archi- 
tectural backgrounds was not forthcoming in his age. 
Art had to go through a toilsome period of geo- 
metrical and anatomical pedantry, before it could 
venture, in the frescoes of Michael Angelo and 
Raphael, to return with greater wealth of knowledge 
on a higher level to the divine simplicity of its 
childhood in Giotto. 

In the drawing of the figure Giotto was sur- 
passed by many meaner artists of the fifteenth cen- 
tury. Nor had he that quality of genius which 
selects a high type of beauty, and is scrupulous to 
shun the commonplace. The faces oF even his most 
sacred personages are often almost vulgar. In his 
choice of models for saints and apostles we already 
trace the Florentine instinct for contemporary por- 
traiture. Yet, though his knowledge of anatomy 
was defective and his taste was reahstic, Giotto 
solved the great problem of figurative art far better 
than more learned and fastidious painters. He never 
failed to make it manifest that what he meant to 
represent was living. Even to the non-existent he 
gave the semblance of reality. We can not help 
beheving in his angels leaning waist-deep from the 
blue sky, wringing their hands in agony above the 
Cross, pacing like deacons behind Christ when He 
washes the feet of His disciples, or sitting watchful 
and serene upon the empty sepulchre. He was, 



194 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

moreover, essentially a fresco-painter, working with 
rapid decision on a large scale, aiming at broad 
effects, and willing to sacrifice subtlety to clearness 
of expression. The health of his whole nature and 
his robust good sense are everywhere apparent in 
his solid, concrete, human work of art. There is no 
trace of mysticism, no ecstatic piety, nothing morbid 
or hysterical, in his imagination. Imbuing whatever 
he handled with the force and freshness of actual 
existence, Giotto approached the deep things of the 
Christian faith and the legend of S. Francis in the 
spirit of a man bent simply on realizing the objects 
of his belief as facts. His allegories of Poverty, 
Chastity, and Obedience, at Assisi, are as beautiful 
and powerfully felt as they are carefully constructed. 
Yet they conceal no abstruse spiritual meaning, but 
are plainly painted ' for the poor laity of love to 
read.* The artist-poet who colored the virginal 
form of Poverty, with the briars beneath her feet 
and the roses blooming round her forehead, proved 
by his well-known canzone that he was free from 
monastic Quixotism, and took a practical view of 
the value of worldly wealth.^ His homely humor 
saved him from the exaltation and the childishness 
that formed the weakness of the Franciscan revival. 
By the same firm grasp upon reality he created 
more than mere abstractions in his chiaroscuro 

' See Trucchi, ' Poesie Italiane Inedite,* vol. ii. p. 8. 



S. FRANCESCO AT ASSIST. 195 

figures of the virtues and vices at Padua. Fortitude 
and Justice, Faith and Envy, are gifted by him with 
a real corporeal existence. They seem fit to play 
their parts with other concrete personalities upon 
the stage of this world's history. Giotto in truth 
possessed a share of that power which belonged to 
the Greek sculptors. He embodied myths in phys- 
ical forms, adequate to their intellectual meaning. 
This was in part the secret of the influence he exer- 
cised over the sculptors of the second period ; ^ and 
had the conditions of the age been favorable to 
such development, some of the allegorical types 
created by him might have passed into the Pantheon 
of popular worship as deities incarnate. 

The birth of Italian painting is closely connected 
with the religious life of the Italians. The building 
of the church of S. Francis at Assisi gave it the 
first great impulse ; and to the piety aroused by S. 
Francis throughout Italy, but mostly in the valleys 
of the Apennines, it owed its animating spirit in the 
fourteenth century. The church of Assisi is double. 
One structure of nave and choir and transept is 
imposed upon another ; and the walls of both, from 
floor to coping-stone, are covered with fresco — 
painted pictures taking here the place occupied by 
mosaic in such churches as the cathedral of Mon- 
reale, or by colored glass in the northern cathedrals 

* See above, pp. 1 19-122. 



196 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY, 

of the pointed style. Many of these frescoes date 
from years before the birth of Giotto. Giunta the 
Pisan, Gaddo Gaddi, and Cimabue are supposed to 
have worked there, painfully continuing or feebly 
struggling to throw off the decadent traditions of a 
dying art. In their school Giotto labored, and 
modern painting arose with the movement of new 
life beneath his brush. Here, pondering in his 
youth upon the story of Christ's suffering, and in 
his later manhood on the virtues of S. Francis and 
his vow, he learned the secret of giving the sem- 
blance of flesh and blood reality to Christian thought. 
His achievement was nothing less than this. The 
Creation, the Fall, the Redemption of the World, 
the moral discipline of man, the Judgment, and the 
final state of bliss or misery — all these he quickened 
into beautiful and breathing forms. Those were 
noble days, when the painter had literally acres of 
walls given him to cover ; when the whole belief of 
Christendom, grasped by his own faith, and firmly 
rooted in the faith of the people round him, as yet 
unimpaired by alien emanations from the world of 
classic culture, had to be set forth for the first time 
in art. His work was then a Bible, a compendium of 
grave divinity and human history, a book embracing 
all things needful for the spiritual and the civil life 
of man. He spoke to men who could not read, for 
whom there were no printed pages, but whose heart 



GlOTTaS INFLUENCE. 197 

received his teaching through the eye. Thus paint- 
ing was not then what it is now, a decoration of 
existence, but a potent and efficient agent in the 
education of the race. Such opportunities do not 
occur twice in the same age. Once in Greece for 
the pagan world ; once in Italy for the modern 
world ; — that must suffice for the education of the 
human race. 

Like Niccola Pisano, Giotto not only founded a 
school in his native city, but spread his manner far 
and wide over Italy, so that the first period of the 
history of painting is the Giottesque. The Gaddi 
of Florence, Giottino, Puccio Capanna, the Loren- 
zetti of Siena, Spinello of Arezzo, Andrea Orcagna, 
Domenico Veneziano, and the lesser artists of the 
Pisan Campo Santo, were either formed or influ- 
enced by him. To give account of the frescoes of 
these painters would be to describe how the relig- 
ious, social, and philosophical conceptions of the 
fourteenth century found complete expression in 
form and color. By means of allegory and pic- 
tured scene they drew the portrait of the Middle 
Age in Italy, performng jointly and in combination 
with the followers of Niccola Pisano what Dante 
had done singly by his poetry. 

It has often been remarked that the drama of the 
life beyond this world — its prologue in the courts of 
death, the tragedy of judgment, and the final state of 



198 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

bliss or misery prepared for souls — preoccupied the 
mind of the Italians at the close of the Middle Ages. 
Every city had its pictorial representation of the 
Dies Irce ; and within this framework the artist was 
free to set forth his philosophy of human nature, 
adding such touches of satire or admonition as suited 
his own temper or the circumstances of the place for 
which he worked. Dante's poem has immortalized 
this moment of Italian consciousness, when the belief 
in anothei world was used to intensify the emotions 
of this life — when the inscrutable darkness toward 
which men traveJ became for them a black and pol- 
ished mirror, reflecting with terrible luminousness 
the events of the present and the past. So familiar 
had the Italians become with the theme of death 
artistically treated that they did not shrink from 
acted pageants of the tragedy of Hell. Giovanni 
Villani tells us that in 1304 the companies and clubs 
of pleasure, formed for making festival throughout 
the town of Florence on the ist of May, contended 
with each other for the prize of novelty and rarity in 
sports provided for the people. Among the rest, the 
Borgo S. Friano had it cried about the streets that 
' whoso wished for news from the other world should 
find himself on May-day on the bridge Carraja or the 
neighboring banks of Arno. And in Arno they 
contrived stages upon boats and various small craft, 
and made the semblance and figure of Hell there 



INFERNO AND PAR AD I SO. 199 

with flames and other pains and torments, with men 
dressed as demons horrible to see ; and others had 
the shape of naked souls ; and these they gave unto 
those divers tortures with exceeding great crying 
and groaning and confusion, the which seemed hate- 
ful and appalling unto eyes and ears. The novelty 
of the sport drew many citizens, and the bridge Car- 
raja, then of wood, was so crowded that it brake in 
several places and fell with the folk upon it, whereby 
were many killed and drowned, and many were dis- 
abled ; and as the crier had proclaimed, so now in death 
went much folk to learn news of the other world.' 

Such being the temper of the people, we find 
that some of the greatest works of art in this age 
were paintings of Death and Hell, Heaven and 
Judgment. Orcagna, in the Strozzi Chapel of S. 
Maria Novella, set forth these scenes with a wonder- 
ful blending of beauty and grotesque invention. In 
the treatment of the Inferno he strove to delineate 
the whole geography of Dante's first canttca, tracing 
the successive circles and introducing the various 
episodes commemorated by the poet. Interesting 
as this work may be for the illustration of the 
Divine Comedy as understood by Dante's immediate 
successors, we turn from it with a sense of relief to 
admire the saints and angels ranged in goodly row, 
* each burning upward to his point of bliss,' whereby 
the painter has depicted Paradise. Early Italian 



200 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY: 

art has nothing more truly beautiful to offer than the 
white-robed Madonna kneeling at the judgment-seat 
^ of Christ.^ 

It will be felt by every genuine student of art 
that if Orcagna painted these frescoes in S. Maria 
Novella, whereof there is no doubt, he could not 
have executed the wall-paintings in the Campo 
Santo at Pisa attributed to him by Vasari. Whether 
Pietro and Ambrogio Lorenzetti were the artists to 
whom we owe those three grave and awful panels 
may still be regarded an open question, though 
recent investigations have rendered this hypothesis 

^ The wonderful beauty of Orcagna's faces, profile after profile laid 
together like lilies in a garden border, can only be discovered after 
long study. It has been my good fortune to examine, through the 
kindness of Mrs. Higford Burr, a large series of tracings, taken 
chiefly by the Right Hon. A. H. Layard, from the frescoes of Giot- 
tesque and other early masters, which, by the selection of simple form 
in outline, demonstrate not only the grand composition of these 
religious paintings, but also the incomparable loveliness of their types. 
How great the Trecentisti were as draughtsmen, how imaginative was 
the beauty of their conception, can be best appreciated by thus arti- 
ficially separating their design from their coloring. The semblance 
of archaism disappears, and leaves a vision of pure beauty, delicate 
and spiritual. The collection to which I have alluded was made 
some years ago, when access to the wall-paintings of Italy for the 
purpose of tracing was still possible. It includes nearly the whole of 
Lorenzetti's work in the Sala della Pace, much of Giotto, the Gozzoli 
frescoes at S. Gemignano, frescoes of the Veronese masters and of 
the Paduan Baptistery, a great deal of Piero della Francesca, Mantegna, 
' Luini, Gaudenzio Ferrari, Piuturicchio, Masolino, etc. The earliest 
masters of Arezzo, Pisa, Siena, Urbino are copiously illustrated, while 
few burghs or hamlets of the Tuscan and Umbrian districts have been 
left unvisited. This unique collection belongs to Mrs. Higford Burr, 
of Aldermaston. That it should somehow be rendered useful to art- 
students is much to be desired. 



FRESCOES OF THE PIS AN CEMETERY. 201 

probable.^ At the end of the southern wall of the 
cemetery, exposed to a cold and equal north light 
from the cloister windows, these great compositions, 
after the lapse of five centuries, bring us face to face 
with the most earnest thoughts of mediaeval Chris- 
tianity. Their main purpose seems to be to illus- 
trate the advantage of the ascetic over the secular 
mode of life, and to school men into living with the 
fear of death before their eyes. The first displays 
the solitary vigils, self-imposed penances, cruel temp- 
tations, firm endurance, and beatific visions of the 
anchorites in the Thebaid. The second is devoted 
to the triumph of Death over the pomp, strength, 
wealth, and beauty of the world. The third reveals 
a grimly realistic and yet awfully imaginative vision 
of judgment, such as it has rarely been granted to a 
painter to conceive. Thus to the awakening soul of 
the Italians, on the threshold of the modern era, 
with the sonnets of Petrarch and the stories of 
Boccaccio sounding in their memories, this terrible 
master presented the three saddest phantoms of the 
Middle Ages— the specter of death omnipotent, the 
soHtude of the desert as the only refuge from a 
sinful and doomed world, the dread of divine justice 
inexorable and inevitable. In those piles of the 
promiscuous and abandoned dead, those fiends and 

*See Crowe and Cavalcaselle, vol. i. pp. 445-451, for a discussion 
of the question. 



202 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY, 

angels poised in mid-air struggling for souls, those 
blind and mutilated beggars vainly besieging Death 
with prayers and imprecations for deliverance, while 
she descends in her robe of woven wire to mow 
down with her scythe the knights and ladies in their 
garden of delight ; again in those horses snuffing at 
the open graves, those countesses and princes face 
to face with skeletons, those serpents coiling round 
the flesh of what was once fair youth or maid, those 
multitudes of guilty men and women trembling 
beneath the trump of the archangel — tearing their 
cheeks, their hair, their breasts in agony, because 
they see Hell through the prison-bars, and hear the 
raging of its fiends, and feel the clasp upon their 
wrists and ankles of clawed hairy demon hands ; in all 
this terrific amalgamation of sinister and tragic ideas, 
vividly presented, full of coarse dramatic power, 
and intensified by faith in their material reality, the 
Lorenzetti brethren, if theirs be indeed the hands 
that painted here, summed up the nightmares of the 
Middle Age and bequeathed an ever-memorable 
picture of its desolate preoccupations to the rising 
world. They have called to their aid poetry, and 
history, and legend. Boccaccio supplies them with the 
garden scene of youths and damsels dancing among 
roses, while the plague is at their gates and death is 
in the air above. From Petrarch they have bor- 



INTENSE EARNESTNESS OF EARLY ART 203 

rowed the form and mystic robe of Death herself.^ 
Uguccione della Faggiuola has sat for the portrait 
of the Captain who must quail before the terrors of 
the tomb, and Castruccio Castracane is the strong 
man cut off in the blossom of his age. The prisons 
of the Visconti have disgorged their victims, cast 
adrift with maiming that makes life unendurable but 
does not hasten death.^ The lazar-houses and the 
charnels have been ransacked for forms of grisly 
decay. Thus the whole work is not merely ' an 
hieroglyphical and shadowed lesson * of ascetic phi- 
losophy ; it is also a realization of mediaeval life in 
its crudest intensity and most uncompromising truth. 
For mere beauty these painters had but little regard.* 
Their distribution of the subjects chosen for treatment 
on each panel shows, indeed, a keen sense for the 
value of dramatic contrast and a masterly power of 
varying while combining the composition. Their 
chief aim, however, is to produce the utmost realism 
of effect, to translate the poignancy of passion, the 

' Ed una donna involta in veste negra. 
Con un furor qual io non so se mai 
Al tempo de' giganti fosse a Flegra. 

Trionfo della Morte, cap. i. 31. 

■ On a scroll above these wretches is written this legend : 
Dacche prosperitade ci ha lasciati, 
O morte, medicina d'ogni pena, 
Deh vieni a dame omai I'ultima cena. 

' This might be used as an argument against the Lorenzetti hypoth- 
esis ; for their work at Siena is eminently beautiful. 



204 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY, 

dread certainty of doom, into forms of unmistakable 
fidelity. Therefore they do not shrink from prosaic 
and revolting details. The knight who has to hold 
his nose above the open grave, the lady who presses 
her cheek against her hand with a spasm of distress, 
the horse who pricks his ears and snorts with open 
nostrils, the grooms who start aside like savage 
creatures, all suggest the loathsomeness of death, its 
physical repulsiveness. In the Last Judgment the 
same kind of dramatic force is used to heighten a 
sublime conception. The crouching attitude and 
the shrouded face of the Archangel Raphael, whose 
eyes alone are visible above the hand that he has 
thrust forth from his cloak to hide the grief he feels, 
prove more emphatically than any less realistic 
motive could have done how terrible, even for the 
cherubic beings to whose guardianship the human 
race has been assigned, will be the trumpet of the 
wrath of God.^ Studying these frescoes, we can not 
but reflect what nerves, what brains, what hearts 
encased in triple brass the men who thought and 
felt thus must have possessed. They make us com- 
prehend not merely the stern and savage temper of 
the Middle Ages, but the intense and fiery ebuUition 
of the Renaissance, into which, as by a sudden 

* The attitude and the eyes of this archangel have an imaginative 
potency beyond that of any other motive used by any painter to suggest 
the terror of the Dies Ircc. Simplicity and truth of vision in the artist 
have here touched the very summit of intense dramatic presentation. 



THEOLOGY AND S. DOMINIC. 205 

liberation, so much imprisoned pent-up force was 
driven. 

A different but scarcely less important phase of 
mediaeval thought is imaged in the frescoes of the 
Capella degli Spagnuoli in S. Maria Novella.^ Dog- 
matic theology is here in the ascendant. While S. 
Francis bequeathed a legend of singular suavity and 
beauty, overflowing with the milk of charity and 
mildness, to the Church, S. Dominic assumed the 
attitude of the saint militant and orthodox. Dante's 
words about him — 

L'amoroso drudo^ 
Delia fede Cristiana, il santo atleta, 
Benigno a' suoi, ed a' nemici crudo," 

omit nothing that is needed to characterize the im- 

* The * Triumph of S. Thomas Aquinas,' in this cloister chapel, has 
long been declared the work of Taddeo Gaddi. * The Triumph of the 
Church Militant,' and the 'Consecration of S. Dominic,* used to be 
ascribed, on the faith of Vasari, to Simone Martini of Siena. Inde- 
pendently of its main subject, this vast wall-painting is specially inter- 
esting on account of its portraits. The work has a decidedly Sienese 
character; but recent critics are inclined to assign it to a certain 
Andrea, of Florence. See Crowe and Cavalcaselle, vol. ii p. 89. The 
same critics doubt the hand of Taddeo Gaddi in the * Triumph of S. 
Thomas,' vol. i. p. 374, and remark that ' these productions of the art 
of the fourteenth century are, indeed, second-class works, executed by 
pupils of the Sienese and Florentine school, and unworthy of the high 
Draise which has ever been given to them.' Whatever may be ulti- 
mately thought about the question of their authorship and pictorial 
merit, their interest to the student of Italian painting in relation to 
mediaeval thought will always remain indisputable. Few buildings 
in the length and breadth of Italy possess such claims on our attention 
as the Capella degli Spagnuoli. 

« The amorous fere of the Christian faith, the holy athlete, gentle 
to his own, and to his foes cruel. 



2o6 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

pression produced upon the Christian world by this 
remorseless foe of heresy, this champion of the faith 
who dealt in butcheries and burnings. S. Francis 
taught love ; S. Dominic taught wrath ; and both, 
perhaps, were needed for the safety of the mediaeval 
Church — the one by resuscitating the spirit of the 
Gospels, the other by resisting the intrusion of alien 
ideals ere the time for their triumph had arrived. 
What the painters of these frescoes undertook to 
delineate for the Dominicans of Florence was the 
fabric of society sustained and held together by 
the action of inquisitors and doctors issued from 
their order. The Pope with his Cardinals, the Em- 
peror with his Council, represent the two chief forces 
of Christendom, as conceived by the mediaeval jurists 
and the school of Dante. Seated on thrones, they 
are ready to rise in defense of Holy Church, sym- 
bolized by a picture of S. Maria del Fiore. At their 
feet the black and white hounds of the Dominican 
order — Domini canes, according to the monkish 
pun — are hunting heretical wolves. Opposite this 
painting is the apotheosis of S. Thomas Aquinas. 
Beneath the footstool of this ' dumb ox of Sicily,' as 
he was called, grovel the heresiarchs — Arius, Sabel- 
lius, Averrhoes. At again a lower level, as though 
supporting the saint on either hand, are ranged 
seven sacred and seven profane sciences, each with 
its chief representative. Thus Rhetoric and Cicero, 



TRIUMPH OF S. THOMAS AQUINAS. 207 

Civil Law and Justinian, Speculative Theology and 
the Areopagite, Practical Theology and Peter Lom- 
bard, Geometry and Euclid, Arithmetic and Abra- 
ham, are grouped together. It will be seen that the 
whole learning of the Middle Age — its philosophy 
as well as its divinity — is here combined as in a 
figured abstract, for the wise to comment on and for 
the simple to peruse. None can avoid drawing the 
lesson that knowledge exists for the service of the 
Church, and that the Church, while she instructs 
society, will claim complete obedience to her de- 
crees. The ipse dixit of the Dominican author of 
the Summa is law. 

Such frescoes, by no means uncommon in Do- 
minican cloisters, still retain great interest for the 
student of scholastic thought. In the church of S. 
Maria Sopra Minerva at Rome, where Galileo was 
afterward compelled to sign his famous retractation, 
Filippino Lippi painted another triumph of S. 
Thomas, conceived in the spirit of Taddeo Gaddi's, 
but expressed with the freedom of the middle Re- 
naissance. Nor should we neglect to notice the 
remarkable picture by Traini in S. Caterina at Pisa. 
Here the doctor of Aquino is represented in an 
aureole surrounded by a golden sphere or disk, on the 
edge of which are placed the four evangelists, together 
with Moses and S. Paul.^ At his side, within the 

' Every thing outside this golden region is studded with stars to 
signify an E-n-ovpdvcoi tottoS, or heaven of heavens. S. Thomas and the 



2o8 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY, 

burnished sphere, Plato and Aristotle stand upright, 
holding the Timceus and the Ethics in their hands. 
Christ in glory is above the group, emitting from His 
mouth three rays upon the head of S. Thomas. 
Single rays descend in like manner upon the evan- 
gelists and Moses and S. Paul. They, like Plato 
and Aristotle, hold open books ; and rays from these 
eight volumes converge upon the head of the an- 
gelical doctor, who becomes the focus, as it were, of 
all the beams sent forth from Christ and from the 
classic teachers, whether directly effused or trans- 
mitted through the writers of the Bible. S. Thomas 
lastly holds a book open in his hand, and carries 
others on his lap ; while lines of light are shed from 
these upon two bands of the faithful, chiefly Do- 
minican monks, arranged on each side of his footstool. 
Averrhoes lies prostrate beneath his feet, with his 
book face downward, lightning-smitten by a shaft 
from the leaves of the volume in the saint's hand, 
whereon is written : Veritatem Tneditabitur guttur 
meuTn et labia mea detestabuntur ifnpium} 

This picture, afterward repeated by Benozzo 
Gozzoli with some change in the persons,^ has been 

Greeks are inside the golden sphere of science, and below on earth are 
the heresiarchs and faithful. Rosini gives a faithful outline of this 
picture in his Atlas of Illustrations. 

* ' For my mouth shall speak truth ; and wickedness is an abomina- 
tion to my lips.' — Prov. viii. 7. 

^ Gozzoli's picture is now in the Louvre. I think Guillaume de 
Saint Amour takes the place of Averrhoes, 



AVERRHOISM IN ART. 209 

minutely described, because it is important to bear 
in mind the measure of inspiration conceded by the 
mediaeval Church to the fathers of Greek philosophy, 
and her utter detestation of the peripatetic traditions 
transmitted through the Arabic by Averrhoes. Aver- 
rhoes, though Dante placed him with the great souls 
of pagan civilization in the first circle of Inferno/ 
was regarded as the protagonist of infidelity. The 
myth of incredulity that gathered round his memory 
and made him hated in the Middle Ages has 
been traced with exquisite delicacy by Renan,^ who 
shows that his name became a rallying-point for 
freethinkers. Scholars like Petrarch were eager to 
confute his sect, and artists used him as a symbol of 
materialistic disbelief Thus we meet with Averrhoes 
among the lost souls in the Pisan Campo Santo, 
distinguished as usual by his turban and long beard. 
On the other hand, the frank acceptance of pagan 
philosophy, in so far as it could be accommodated to 
the doctrine of the Church, finds full expression in 
the art of this early period. On the walls of the 
Palazzo Pubblico at Siena were painted the figures 
of Curius Dentatus and Cato,^ while the pavement 

^ Inf. iv. 144. 

^ ' Averroes et rAverroisme,' pp. 236-316. 

" In the chapel. They are the work of Taddeo di Bartolo, and 
bear this inscription : ' Specchiatevi in costoro, voi che reggete.' The 
mediaeval painters of Italy learned lessons of civility and government 
as willingly from classical tradition, as they deduced the lessons of 
piety and godly living from the Bible. Herein they were akin to 



2IO RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

of the Duomo showed Hermes Trismegistus in- 
structing both a pagan and a Christian, and Socrates 
ascending the steep hill of virtue. Perugino, some 
years later, decorated the Sala del Cambio at Peru- 
gia with the heroes, philosophers, and worthies of 
the ancient world. We are thus led by a gradual 
progress up to the final achievement of Raphael in 
the Vatican. Separating the antique from the 
Christian tradition, but placing them upon an 
equality in his art, Raphael made the School of 
Athens an epitome of Greek and Roman wisdom, 
while in the Dispute of the Sacrament he symbolized 
the Church in heaven and Church on earth. 

Another class of ideas, no less illustrative of 
mediaevalism, can be studied in the Palazzo Pub- 
blico at Siena. There, on the walls of the Sala 
della Pace or de' Nove, may be seen the frescoes 
whereby Ambrogio Lorenzetti expressed theories of 
society and government peculiar to his age.^ The 
panels are three in number. In the first the painter 
has dehneated the Commune of Siena by an im- 
perial male figure in the prime of life, throned on a 
judgment-seat, holding a scepter in his right hand 
and a medallion of Justice in his left.^ He wears 

Dante, who chose Virgil for the symbol of the human understanding, 
and Beatrice for the symbol of divine wisdom, revealed to man in 
Theology. 

^ He began his work in 1337. 

* A similar mode of symbolizing the Commune is chosen in the bass- 



POLITICAL THEORIES IN ART. 211 

no coronet, but a burgher's cap ; and beneath his 
footstool are the Roman twins, suckled by the she- 
wolf.^ Above his head in the air float Faith, 
Charity, and Hope — the Christian virtues ; while 
Justice, Temperance, Magnanimity, Prudence, For- 
titude, and Peace, six women, crowned, and with 
appropriate emblems, are enthroned beside him. 
The majestic giant of the Commune towers above 
them all in bulk and stature, as though to indicate 
the people's sovereignty. The virtues are his assess- 
ors and inspirers — he is king. Beneath the dais 
occupied by these supreme personages are ranged 
on either hand mailed and visored cavaliers, mounted 
on chargers, the guardians of the state. All the 
citizens in their degrees advance toward the throne, 
carrying between them, pair by pair, a rope received 
from the hands of Concord ; while some who have 
transgressed her laws are being brought with bound 
hands to the judgment-seat. Concord herself, being 
less the virtue of the government than of the gov- 
erned, is seated on a line with the burghers in a 
place apart beneath the throne of Civil Justice, who 
is allegorized as the dispenser of rewards and punish- 
ments, as well as controller of the armed force and 

reliefs of Archbishop Tarlati's tomb at Arezzo, where the discord of 
the city is represented by an old man of gigantic stature, throned and 
maltreated by the burghers, who are tearing out his hair by handfuls. 
Over this figure is written ' II Comune Pelato.' 

* These were adopted as the ensign of Siena, in the Middle Ages. 



212 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

the purse of the community. The whole of this 
elaborate allegory suffers by the language of descrip- 
tion. Those who have seen it, and who are familiar 
with Sienese chronicles, feel that, artistically la- 
bored as the painter's work may be, every figure 
had a passionate and intense meaning for him.^ His 
picture is the epitome of government conducted by a 
sovereign people. Nor can we fail to be struck with 
the beauty of some details. The pale, earnest faces 
of the horsemen are eminently chivalrous, with 
knightly honor written on their calm and fearless 
features. Peace, reclining at ease upon her pillow, 
is a lovely woman in loose raiment, her hair wreathed 
with blossoms, in her hand an olive-branch, her feet 
reposing upon casque and shield. She is like a 
painted statue, making us wonder whether the artist 
had not copied her from the Aphrodite of Lysippus, 
ere the Sienese destroyed this statue in their dread 
of paganism.^ 

* In the year 1336, just before Ambrogio began to paint, the 
Sienese Republic had concluded a league with Florence for the main- 
tenance of the Guelf party. The Monte de' Nove still ruled the city 
with patriotic spirit and equity, and had not yet become a forceful 
oligarchy. The power of the Visconti was still in its cradle ; the great 
plague had not devastated Tuscany. As early as 1355 the whole of 
the fair order represented by Ambrogio was shaken to the foundation, 
and Siena deserved the words applied to it by De Comines. See 
^ h%'^ of the Despots,' p. 207, note 2. 

' Rio, perversely bent on stigmatizing whatever in Italian art 
wAvors of the Renaissance, depreciates this lovely form of Peace. 
*L'Art Chretien,' vol. i. p. 57. 



GOOD AND BAD GOVERNMENT. 213 

In the other two panels of this hall Ambrogio 
Lorenzetti painted the contrast of good and bad 
government, harmony and discord. A city full of 
brawls and bloodshed is set in opposition to one 
where the dance and viol do not cease. Merchants 
are plundered as they issue from the gates on one 
side ; on the other, trains of sumpter-mules are 
securely winding along mountain paths. Tyranny, 
with all the vices for his council and with Terror for 
prime minister, presides over the ill-governed town. 
The burghers of the happy commune follow trade 
or pleasure, as they Hst ; a beautiful winged genius, 
inscribed Securitas, floats above their citadel. It 
should be added that in both these pictures the 
architecture is the same ; for the painter has de- 
signed to teach how different may be the state of 
one and the same city according to its form of gov- 
ernment. Such, then, were the vivid images whereby 
Ambrogio Lorenzetti expressed the mediaeval curse 
of discord, and the ideal of a righteous rule. It is 
only necessary to read the Diario Sanese of Alle- 
gretto Allegretti in order to see that he drew no 
fancy picture. The torchlight procession of burghers 
swearing amity by couples in the cathedral there 
described receives exact pictorial illustration in the 
fresco of the Sala della Pace.^ Siena, by her bloody 

• See Muratori, vol. xxiii. or the passage translated by me in the 
•Age of the Despots,' p. 616. 



214 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

factions and her passionate peacemakings, expressed 
in daily action what the painter had depicted on her 
palace walls. 

The method of treatment adopted for these 
chapters has obliged me to give priority to Florence, 
and to speak of the two Lorenzetti, Pietro in the 
Pisan Campo Santo and Ambrogio in the Sala della 
Pace at Siena, as though they were followers of 
Giotto ; so true is it that the main currents of 
Tuscan art were governed by Florentine influences, 
and that Giotto's genius made itself felt in all the 
work of his immediate successors. It must, how- 
ever, be observed that painting had an independent 
origin among the Sienese, and that Guido da Siena 
may claim to rank even earlier than Cimabue.^ In 
the year 1260, just before engaging in their duel 
with Florence, the Sienese dedicated their city to 
the Virgin ; and the victory of Montaperti, following 
immediately upon this vow, gave a marked impulse 
to their piety .^ The early masters of Siena devoted 
themselves to religious paintings, especially to pic- 
tures of Madonna suited for chapels and oratories. 
We find upon these mystic panels an ecstasy of 

^ His 'Madonna' in S. Domenico is dated 1221. For a full dis- 
cussion of Guido da Siena's date, see Crowe and Cavalcaselle, vol. i. 
pp. 180-185. 

* On their coins the Sienese struck this legend : ' Sena vetus Civi- 
tas Virginis.' It will be remembered how the Florentines, two centU" 
ries and a half later, dedicated their city to Christ as king. 



DUCCIO'S MADONNA. 215 

adoration and a depth of fervor which are alien to 
the more sober spirit of Florence, combined with an 
almost infantine delight in pure bright colors, and 
in the decorative details of the miniaturist. 

The first great painter among the Sienese was 
Duccio di Buoninsegna.^ The completion of his 
masterpiece — a picture of the Majesty of the Virgin, 
executed for the high altar of the Duomo — marked 
an epoch in the history of Siena. Nearly two years 
had been spent upon it ; the painter receiving six- 
teen soldi a day from the Commune, together with 
his materials, in exchange for his whole time and 
skill and labor. At last, on June 9, 13 10, it was 
carried from Duccio's workshop to its place in the 
cathedral. A procession was formed by the clergy, 
with the archbishop at their head, followed by the 
magistrates of the Commune, and the chief men of 
the Monte de' Nove. These great folk crowded 
round their lady ; after came a multitude of burghers 
bearing tapers ; while the rear was brought up by 
women and children. The bells rang and trumpets 
blew as this new image of the Sovereign Mistress of 
Siena was borne along the summer-smiling streets of 
her metropolis to take its throne in her high temple. 
Duccio's altar-piece presented on one face to the 
spectator a Virgin seated with the infant Christ 
upon her lap, and receiving the homage of the patron 

* Date of birth unknown ; date of death, about 132a 



2i6 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

saints of Siena On the other, he depicted the 
principal scenes of the Gospel story and the Passion 
of our Lord in twenty-eight compartments. What 
gives peculiar value to this elaborate work of Sienese 
art is that in it Duccio managed to combine the tra- 
dition of an early hieratic style of painting with all 
the charm of brilliant coloring, and with dramatic 
force of presentation only rivaled at that time by 
Giotto. Independently of Giotto, he performed at a 
stroke what Cimabue and his pupil had achieved for 
the Florentines, and bequeathed to the succeeding 
painters of Siena a tradition of art beyond which 
they rarely passed. 

Far more than their neighbors at Florence, the 
Sienese remained fettered by the technical methods 
and the pietistic formulae of the earliest religious 
painting. To make their conventional representa- 
tions of Madonna's love and woe and glory burn 
with all the passion of a fervent spirit, and to testify 
their worship by the oblation of rich gifts in color- 
ing and gilding massed around her, was their earnest 
aim. It followed that, when they attempted subjects 
on a really large scale, the faults of the miniaturist 
clung about them. I need hardly say that Ambrogio 
and Pietro Lorenzetti form notable exceptions to 
this general statement. It may be applied, however, 
with some truth to Simone Martini, the painter, who 
during his lifetime enjoyed a celebrity only second to 



SIM ONE MARTINI. 217 

that of Giotto.^ Like Giotto, Simone exercised his 
art in many parts of Italy. Siena, Pisa, Assisi, 
Orvieto, Naples, and Avignon can still boast of wall 
and easel pictures from his hand ; and though it has 
been suggested that he took no part in the decora- 
tion of the Capella degli Spagnuoli, the impress of 
his manner remains at Florence in those noble fres- 
coes of the Church Militant and the Consecration of 
S. Dominic} Simone's first undisputed works are 
to be seen at Siena and at Assisi, where we learn 
what he could do as difrescante in competition with 
the ablest Florentines. In the Palazzo Pubblico of 
his native city he painted a vast picture of the Virgin 
enthroned beneath a canopy and surrounded by 
saints ; ^ while at Assisi he put forth his whole power 
in portraying the legend of S. Martin. In all his 

* He is better known as Simone Memmi, a name given to him by 
a mistake of Vasari's. He was bom in 1283, at Siena. He died in 
1344 at Avignon. Petrarch mentions his portrait of Madonna Laura, 
in the 49th and 50th sonnets of the Rime in Vita di Madonna Laura. 
In another place he uses these words about Simone : ' duos ego novi 
pictores egregios, nee formosos, Jottum Florentinum civem, cujus in- 
ter modemos fama ingens est, et Simonem Senensem.' — Epist. Fam. 
lib. V. 17, p. 653. Petrarch proceeds to mention that he has also 
known sculptors, and asserts their inferiority to painters in modem 
times. 

"^ See above, p. 205. Messrs. Crowe and Cavalcaselle reject, not 
without reason, as it seems to me, the tradition that Simone painted 
the frescoes of S. Ranieri in the Campo Santo at Pisa. See vol. ii. p. 
83. What remains of his work at Pisa is an altar-piece in S. Caterina. 

^ To Simone is also attributed the interesting portrait of Guidoric- 
cio Fogliani de' Ricci, on horseback, in the Sala del Consiglio. This, 
however, has been so much repainted as to have lost its character. 



2i8 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

paintings we trace the skill of an exquisite and pa- 
tient craftsman, elaborately careful to finish his work 
with the utmost refinement, sensitive to feminine 
beauty, full of delicate inventiveness, and gifted with 
a rare feeling for grace. These excellent qualities 
tend, however, toward affectation and over-softness ; 
nor are they fortified by such vigor of conception 
or such majesty in composition as belong to the 
greatest trecentisti. The Lorenzetti alone soared 
high above the Sienese mannerism into a region of 
masculine imaginative art. We feel Simone's charm 
mostly in single heads and detached figures, some 
of which at Assisi have incomparable sweetness. 
Molles Sence, the delicate and femininely variable, 
fond of all things brilliant, and unstable through 
defect of sternness, was the fit mother of this ingeni- 
ous and delightful master. 

After the days of Duccio and Simone Martini, 
of Ambrogio and Pietro Lorenzetti, were over, there 
remained but little for the Sienese to do in painting. 
Taddeo di Bartolo continued the tradition of Duccio, 
as the later Giottesques continued that of Giotto. 
His most remarkable wall-painting is a fresco of the 
Apostles visiting the Virgin, the motive of which is 
marked by great originality.^ Our Lady is seated in 
an open loggia with a company of holy men and 
women round her. Descending from the sky and 

* In S. Francesco at Pisa. 



SPINRLLO ARETINO. 219 

floating through the arches are three of the Apostles, 
while one who has just alighted from his aerial transit 
kneels and folds his hands in adoration. Seldom 
have the longing and the peace of loving worship 
been more poetically expressed than here. The 
seated, kneeling, standing, and flying figures are 
admirably grouped together; their draperies are 
dignified and massive ; and the architectural acces- 
sories help the composition by dividing it into three 
balanced sections. 

Such power of depicting movement was rare in 
the fourteenth century. To find its analogue, we 
must betake ourselves to the frescoes of Spinello 
Aretino, a master more decidedly Giottesque than 
his contemporary, Taddeo di Bartolo.^ A Gabriel, 
rushing down from heaven to salute Madonna, with 
all the whirr of archangelic pinions and the glory of 
Paradise around him, is a fine specimen of Spinello's 
vehemence. The same quality, more tempered, is 
noticeable in his frescoes of the legend of S. Ephe- 
sus at Pisa.^ Few faces in the paintings of any 
period are more fascinating than the profiles under 
steel-blue battle-caps of that god-like pair — the 
knightly saint and the Archangel Michael — break- 
ing by the irresistible force of their onset and their 

* Spinello degli Spinelli was born of a Ghibelline family, exiled from 
Florence, who settled at Arezzo, about 1308. He died at Arezzo in 
1410, aged 92, according to some computations. 

' South wall of the Carapo Santo, on the left hand of the entrance. 



220 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY, 

calm youthful beauty through the mailed ranks of 
the Sardinian pagans. Spinello was essentially a 
warlike painter ; among the best of his compositions 
may be named the series of pictures from the history 
of the Venetian campaign against Frederick Bar- 
barossa.^ It is a pity that the war of liberation 
carried on by the Lombard communes with the Em- 
pire should have left but little trace on Italian art ; 
and therefore these paintings of Spinello, in addition 
to their intrinsic merit, have rare historical interest. 
Delighting in the gleam of armor and the shock of 
speared warriors, Spinello communicated something 
of this fiery spirit even to his saints. The monks of 
Samminiato near Florence employed him in 1388 to 
paint their newly-finished sacristry with the legend 
of S. Benedict. In the execution of this task 
Spinello displayed his usual grandeur and vigor, 
treating the gray-robed brethren of Monte Cassino 
like veritable champions of a militant Church. When 
he died, in 14 10, it might have been truly said that 
the flame of the torch kindled by Giotto was at last 
extinguished. 

The student of history can not but notice with 
surprise that a city famed like Siena for its vanity, 
its factious quarrels, and its delicate living should 
have produced an almost passionately ardent art of 

* In the Sala di Balia of the public palace at Siena. 



SIENA AND PERUGIA, 221 

piety.^ The same reflections are suggested at Pe* 
rugia, torn by the savage feuds of the Oddi and 
BagHoni, at warfare with Assisi, reduced to exhaus- 
tion by the discords of jealous parties, yet memorable 
in the history of painting as the head-quarters of the 
pietistic Umbrian school. The contradiction is, how- 
ever, in both cases more apparent than real. The 
people both of Siena and Perugia were highly im- 
pressible and emotional, quick to obey the prompt- 
ings of their passion, whether it took the form of 
hatred or of love, of spiritual fervor or of carnal 
violence. Yielding at one moment to the preachings 
of S. Bernardino, at another to the persuasions of 
Grifonetto degli Baglioni, the Perugians won the 
character of being fiends or angels according to the 
temper of their leaders; while Siena might boast 
with equal right of having given birth to S. Catherine 
and nurtured Beccadelli. The religious feeling was 
a passion with them on a par with all the other 
movements of their quick and mobile temperament : 
it needed ecstatic art for its interpretation. What 
was cold and sober would not satisfy the men of 
these two cities. The Florentines, more justly 
balanced, less abandoned to the frenzies of impas- 
sioned impulse, less capable of feeling the rapt 
exaltation of the devotee, expressed themselves in 

' See 'Inferno/ xxix. 121 ; the sonnets on the months by Cene 
dalla Chitarra, 'Poeti del Primo Secolo,' vol. ii. pp. 196-207; the epi- 
thet Molles SencB, given by Beccadelli ; and the remarks of De Comines 



222 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

art distinguished for its intellectual power, its sanity, 
its scientific industry, its adequacy to average human 
needs. Therefore Florentine influences determined 
the course of painting in Central Italy. Therefore 
Giotto, who represented the Florentine genius in the 
fourteenth century, set his stamp upon the Loren- 
zetti. The mystic painters of Umbria and Siena 
have their high and honored place in the history of 
Italian art. They supply an element which, except 
in the work of Fra Angelico, was defective at Flor- 
ence; but to the Florentines was committed the 
great charge of interpreting the spirit of Italian civili- 
zation in all its branches, not for the cloister only 
or the oratory, but for humanity at large, through 
painting. 

Giotto and his followers, then, in the fourteenth 
century painted, as we have seen, the religious, philo- 
sophical, and social conceptions of their age. As 
artists, their great discovery was the secret of de- 
picting life. The ideas they expressed belonged to 
the Middle Ages. But by their method and their 
spirit they anticipated the Renaissance. In execut- 
ing their work upon the walls of palaces and churches, 
they employed a kind of fresco. Fresco was essen- 
tially the Florentine vehicle of expression. Among 
the peoples of Central Italy it took the place of 
mosaic in Sicily, Ravenna, and Venice, as the means 
of communicating ideas by forms to the unlettered 



FRESCO. 223 

laity, and as aflfording to the artist the widest and 
the freest sphere for the expression of his thoughts.^ 

* I have not thought it necessary to distinguish between tempera 
and fresco. In tempera painting the colors were mixed with t.g^, 
gum, and other vehicles dissolved in water, and laid upon a dry- 
ground. In fresco painting the colors, mixed only with water, were 
laid upon plaster while still damp. The latter process replaced the 
former for wall-paintings in the fourteenth century. 



CHAPTER V. 

PAINTING. 

Mediaeval motives exhausted — New Impulse toward Technical Perfec* 
tion — Naturalists in Painting — Intermediate Achievement needed 
for the Great Age of Art — Positive Spirit of the Fifteenth Century 
— Masaccio — The Modern Manner — Paolo Uccello — Perspective 
— Realistic Painters — The Model — Piero della Francesca — His 
Study of Form — Resurrection at Borgo San Sepolcro — Melozzo da 
Forli — Squarcione at Padua — Gentile da Fabriano — Fra Angelico 
— Benozzo Gozzoli — His Decorative Style — Lippo Lippi — Frescoes 
at Prato and Spoleto — Filippino Lippi — Sandro Botticelli — His ^^ 
value for the Student of Renaissance Fancy — His feeling for Myth- 
ology — Piero di Cosimo — Domenico Ghirlandajo — In what sense 
he sums up the Age — Prosaic Spirit — Florence hitherto supreme in 
Painting — Extension of Art activity throughout Italy — Medicean 
Patronage. 

After the splendid outburst of painting in the first 
half of the fourteenth century, there came a lull. 
The thoughts and sentiments of mediaeval Italy had 
been now set forth in art. The sincere and simple 
style of Giotto was worked out. But the new culture 
of the Revival had not as yet sufficiently penetrated 
the ItaHans for the painters to express it ; nor had 
they mastered the technicalities of their craft in such 
a manner as to render the delineation of more com- 
plex forms of beauty possible. The years between 
1400 and 1470 may be roughly marked out as the 



NEW AIMS IN ART, 225 

second period of great activity in painting. At this 
time sculpture, under the hands of Ghiberti, Do- 
natello, and Luca della Robbia, had reached a higher 
point than the sister art. The debt the sculptors 
owed to Giotto they new repaid in full measure to 
his successors, in obedience to the law whereby 
sculpture, though subordinated, as in Italy, to paint- 
ing, is more precocious in its evolution. One of the 
most marked features of this period was the progress 
in the art of design, due to bronze modeling and 
bass-relief; for the painters, laboring in the work- 
shops of the goldsmiths and the stone-carvers, 
learned how to study the articulation of the human 
body, to imitate the nude, and to aim by means of 
graduated light and dark at rendering the effect of 
roundness in their drawing. The laws of perspective 
and foreshortening were worked out by Paolo Uccello 
and Brunelleschi. New methods of coloring were 
attempted by the PeselliandthePollajuoli. Abandon- 
ing the conventional treatment of religious themes, 
the artists began to take delight in motives drawn 
from every-day experience. It became the fashion 
to introduce contemporary costumes, striking por- 
traits, and familiar incidents into sacred subjects, so 
that many pictures of this period, though worthless 
to the student of religious art, are interesting 
for their illustration of Florentine custom and char- 
acter. At the same time the painters began to 



226 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

imitate landscape and architecture, loading the back- 
ground of their frescoes with pompous vistas of 
palaces and city towers, or subordinating their 
figures to fantastic scenery of wood and rock and 
sea-shore. Many were naturahsts, delighting, like 
Gentile da Fabriano, in the delineation of field 
flowers and living creatures, or, like Piero di Cosimo, 
in the portrayal of things rare and curious. Gardens 
pleased their eyes, and birds and beasts and insects. 
Whole menageries and aviaries, for instance, were 
painted by Paolo Uccello. Others, again, aban- 
doned the old ground of Christian story for the 
tales of Greece and Rome ; and not the least charm- 
ing products of the time are antique motives treated 
with the freshness of romantic feeling. We look in 
vain for the allegories of the Giottesque masters ; 
that stage of thought has been traversed, and a new 
cycle of poetic ideas, fanciful, idyllic, corresponding 
to Boiardo's episodes rather than to Dante's vision, 
opens for the artist. Instead of seeking to set forth 
vast subjects with the equality of mediocrity, like 
the Gaddi, or to invent architectonic compositions 
embracing the whole culture of their age, like the 
Lorenzetti, the painters were now bent upon realiz- 
ing some special quality of beauty, expressing some 
fantastic motive, or solving some technical problem 
of peculiar difficulty. They had, in fact, outgrown 
the childhood of their art ; and while they had not 



THE MIDDLE PERIOD OF EFFORT, 227 

yet attained to masteiy, \\?A abandoned the impos- 
sible task of making it the medium of universal 
expression, in this way the manifold efforts of the 
workers ik ^.he first half of the fifteenth century pre- 
pared tpe ground for the great painters of the Golden 
A^t5. It remained for Raphael and his contem- 
poraries to achieve the final synthesis of art in 
masterpieces of consummate beauty. But this they 
could not have done without the aid of those innu- 
merable intermediate laborers whose productions 
occupy in art the place of Bacon's media axiomata 
in science. Remembering this, we ought not to 
complain that the purpose of painting at this epoch 
was divided, or that its achievements were imper- 
fect. The whole intellectual conditions of the coun- 
try were those of growth, experiment, preparation, 
and acquisition, rather than of full accomplishment. 
What happened in the field of painting was happen- 
ing also in the field of scholarship ; and we have 
good reason to be thankful that, by the very nature 
of the arts, these tentative endeavors have a more 
enduring charm than the dull tomes of contemporary 
students. Nor, again, is it rational to regret that 
painting, having started with the sincere desire of ex- 
pressing the hopes and fears that agitate the soul of 
man, and raise him to a spiritual region, should now 
be occupied with lessons in perspective and anatomy. 
In the twofold process of discovering the world and 



228 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

man, this dry ground had inevitably to be explored, 
and its exploration could not fail to cost the sacrifice 
of much that was impassioned and imaginative in 
the earlier and less scientific age of art.^ The spirit 
of Cosimo de' Medici, almost cynical in its posi- 
tivism, the spirit of Sixtus IV., almost godless in its 
egotism, were abroad in Italy at this period ; ^ indeed 
the fifteenth century presents at large a spectacle of 
prosaic worldliness and unideal aims. Yet the work 
done by the artists was the best work of the epoch, 
far more fruitful of results and far more perma- 
nently valuable than that of Filelfo inveighing in 
filthy satires against his personal foes, or of Becca- 
delli endeavoring to inoculate modern literature 
with the virus of pagan vices. Petrarch in the four- 
teenth century had preached the evangel of human- 
ism ; Giotto in the fourteenth century had given life 
to painting. The students of the fifteenth, though 
their spirit was so much baser and less large than 
Petrarch's, were following in the path marked out 
for them and leading forward to Erasmus. The 
painters of the fifteenth, though they lacked the unity 
of aim and freshness of their master, were learning 
what was needful for the crowning and fulfillment of 
his labors on a loftier stage. 

Foremost among the pioneers of Renaissance- 

' See 'Age of the Despots,' p. 17. 

■ See 'Revival of Learning,' pp. 168-178. 



MASACCIO. 229 

painting, towering above them all by head and 
shoulders, like Saul among the tribes of Israel, 
stands Masaccio.* The Brancacci chapel of the 
Carmine at Florence, painted in fresco almost en- 
tirely by his hand, was the school where all suc- 
ceeding artists studied, and whence Raphael deigned 
to borrow the composition and the figures of a por- 
tion of his Cartoons. The Legend of S, Catherine^ 
painted by Masaccio in S. Clemente at Rome, 
though an earlier work, is scarcely less remarkable 
as evidence that a new age had begun for art. 
In his frescoes the qualities essential to the style 
of the Renaissance — ^what Vasari calls the modern 
manner — appear precociously full-formed. Besides 
life and nature they have dignity and breadth, the 
grand and heightened manner of emancipated art. 
Masaccio is not inferior to Giotto in his power of 
telling a story with simplicity ; but he understands 
the value of perspective for realizing the circum- 
stances of the scene depicted. His august groups 
of the apostles are surrounded by landscape tran- 
quillizing to the sense and pleasant to the eye. 

* His real name was Tommaso di Ser Giovanni, of the family ot 
Scheggia. Masaccio means in Tuscan, * Great hulking Tom,' just as 
Masolino, his supposed master and fellow-worker, means * Pretty 
little Tom.' Masolino was Tommaso di Cristofero Fini, bom in 1384 
in S. Croce. It is now thought that we have but little of his authentic 
work except the frescoes at Castiglione di Olona, near Milan. Ma- 
saccio was born at San Giovanni, in the u '/'^r valley of the Amo, in 
1402. He died at Rome tn 1429. 



230 RENAISSANCE IN' ITALY. 

Mountain-lines and distant horizons lend space and 
largeness to his compositions, and the figures of his 
men and women move freely in a world prepared 
for them. In Masaccio's management of drapery we 
discern the influence of plastic art ; without conceal- 
ing the limbs, which are always modeled with a free- 
dom that suggests the power of movement even in 
stationary attitudes, the voluminous folds and broad 
masses of powerfully-colored raiment invest his 
forms with a nobility unknown before in painting. 
His power of representing the nude is not less 
remarkable. But what above all else renders his 
style attractive is the sense of aerial space. For 
the first time in art the forms of living persons are 
shovvn moving in a transparent medium of light, 
graduated according to degrees of distance, and 
harmonized by tones tlmt indicate an atmospheric 
unity. In comparing Masaccio with Giotto we 
must admit that, with so much gained, something 
has been sacrificed. Giotto succeeded in present- 
ing the idea, the feeling, the pith of the event, and 
pierced at once to the very ground-root of imagina- 
tion. Masaccio thinks overmuch, perhaps, of ex- 
ternal form, and is intent on air-effects and color- 
ing. He realizes the phenomenal truth with a 
largeness and a dignity peculiar to himself But 
we ask whether he was capable of bringing close 
to our hearts the secret and the sou) of spiritual 



PAOLO UCCELLO. 231 

things. Has not art beneath his touch become 
more scenic, losing thereby somewhat of dramatic 
poignancy ? 

Born in 1402, Masaccio left Florence in 1429 
for Rome, and was not heard of by his family 
again. Thus perished, at the early age of twenty- 
seven, a painter whose work reveals not only the 
originality of real creative genius, but a maturity 
that moves our wonder. What might he not have 
done if he had lived ? Between his style in the 
Brancacci chapel and that of Raphael in the Vati- 
can there seems to be but a narrow gap, which 
might perchance have been passed over by this 
man if death had spared him. 

Masaccio can by no means be taken as a fair 
instance of the painters of his age. Gifted with 
exceptional powers, he overleaped the difficulties 
of his art, and arrived intuitively at results whereof 
as yet no scientific certainty had been secured. 
His contemporaries applied humbler talents to se- 
vere study, and wrought out by patient industry 
those principles which Masaccio had divined. Their 
work is therefore at the same time more archaic 
and more pedantic, judged by modern standards. 
It is difficult to imagine a style of painting less 
attractive than that of Paolo Uccello.^ Yet his 

^ His family name was Doni. He was born about 1396, and died 
at the age of about 73. He got his name Uccello frpni his partiality 
for painting birds, it is said. 



232 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

fresco of the Deluge in the cloisters of S. Maria 
Novella, and his battle-pieces — one of which may 
be seen in the National Gallery — taught nearly 
all that painters needed of perspective. The lesson 
was conveyed in hard, dry, uncouth diagrams, ill- 
colored and deficient in the quality of animation. 
At this period the painters, like the sculptors, were 
trained as goldsmiths, and Paolo had been a crafts- 
man of that guild before he gave his whole mind 
to the study of linear perspective and the drawing 
of animals. The precision required in this trade 
forced artists to study the modeling of the human 
form, and promoted that crude naturalism which 
has been charged against their pictures. Carefully 
to observe, minutely to imitate some actual person— 
the Sandro of your workshop or the Cecco from 
the market-place — became the pride of painters. 
No longer fascinated by the dreams of mediaeval 
mysticism, and unable for the moment to invest 
ideals of the fancy with reality, they meanwhile 
made the great discovery that the body of a man 
is a miracle of beauty, each limb a divine wonder, 
each muscle a joy as great as sight of stars or 
flowers. Much that is repulsive in the pictures of 
the Pollajuoli and Andrea del Castagno, the leaders 
in this branch of realism, is due to admiration for 
the newly-studied mechanism of the human form. 
They seem to have cared but little to select their 



IMPORTANCE OF THE MODEL. 233 

types or to accentuate expression, so long as they 
were able to portray the man before them with 
fidelity.^ The comeliness of average humanity was 
enough for them ; the difficulties of reproducing 
what they saw exhausted their force. Thus the 
master-works on which they staked their reputation 
show them emulous of fame as craftsmen, while 
only here and there, in minor paintings for the 
most part, the poet that was in them sees the light. 
Brunelleschi told Donatello the truth when he said 
that his Christ was a crucified contadino. Intent 
on mastering the art of modeling, and determined 
above all things to be accurate, the sculptor had 
forgotten that something more was wanted in a 
crucifix than the careful study of a robust peasant- 
boy. 

A story of a somewhat later date still further 
illustrates the dependence of the work of art upon 
the model in Renaissance Florence. Jacopo San- 
sovino made the statue of a youthful Bacchus in 
close imitation of a lad called Pippo Fabro. Posing 
for hours together naked in a cold studio, Pippo 
fell into ill health, and finally went mad. In his 
madness he frequently assumed the attitude of the 
Bacchus to which his life had been sacrificed, and 
which is now his portrait. The legend of the painter 
who kept his model on a cross in order that he 

* See above, p. 142, what has been said about Verocchio's * David.' 



234 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY, 

might the more minutely represent the agonies of 
death by crucifixion, is but a mythus of the realistic 
method carried to its logical extremity. 

Piero della Francesca, a native of Borgo San 
Sepolcro, and a pupil of Domenico Veneziano, must 
be placed among the painters of this period who 
advanced their art by scientific study. He carried 
the principles of correct drawing and sohd model- 
ing as far as it is possible for the genius of man to 
do, and composed a treatise on perspective in the 
vulgar tongue. But these are not his best titles to 
fame. By dignity of portraiture, by loftiness of 
style, and by a certain poetical solemnity of imagina- 
tion, he raised himself above the level of the mass 
of his contemporaries. Those who have once seen 
his fresco of the Restirrection in the hall of the 
Compagnia della Misericordia at Borgo San Sepol- 
cro will never forget the deep impression of solitude 
and aloofness from all earthly things produced by it 
It is not so much the admirable grouping and mas- 
terly drawing of the four sleeping soldiers, or even 
the majestic t3^pe of the Christ emergent without 
effort from the grave, as the communication of a 
mood felt by the painter and instilled into our souls, 
that makes this by far the grandest, most poetic, 
and most awe-inspiring picture of the Resurrection. 
The landscape is simple and severe, with the cold 
light upon it of the dawn before the sun is risea 



PIERO BELLA FRANCESCA. 235 

The drapery of the ascending Christ is tinged with 
auroral colors like the earliest clouds of morning ; 
and his level eyes, with the mystery of the slumber 
of the grave still upon them, seem gazing, far be- 
yond our scope of vision, into the region of the 
eternal and illimitable. Thus, with Piero for mysta- 
gogue, we enter an inner shrine of deep religious 
revelation. The same high imaginative faculty 
marks the fresco of the Dream of Constantine in S. 
Francesco at Arezzo, where, it may be said in pass- 
ing, the student of art must learn to estimate what 
Piero could do in the way of accurate foreshorten- 
ing, powerful delineation of solid bodies, and noble 
treatment of drapery.^ To Piero, again, we owe most 
precious portraits of two Italian princes, Sigismondo 
Pandolfo Malatesta and Federigo of Urbino, master- 
pieces^ of fidelity to nature and sound workman- 
ship. 

In addition to the many great paintings that 
command our admiration, Piero claims honor as 
the teacher of Melozzo da Forli and of Luca Sig- 
norelli. Little is left to show the greatness of Me- 
lozzo ; but the frescoes preserved in the Quirinal are 
enough to prove that he continued the grave and 

* A drawing made in red chalk for this ' Dream of Constantine ' has 
been published in fac-simile by Ottley, in his ' Italian School of Design.' 
He wrongly attributes it, however, to Giorgione, and calls it a ' Subject 
Unknown.' 

' The one in S, Francesco at Rimini, the other in the Uffizzi, 



236 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

lofty manner of his master.^ Signorelli bears a 
name illustrious in the first rank of Italian painters ; 
and to speak of him will be soon my duty. It was 
the special merit of these artists to elevate the ideal 
of form and to seek after sublimity, without depart- 
ing from the path of conscientious labor, in an age 
preoccupied on the one hand with technicality and 
naturahsm, on the other with decorative prettiness 
and pietism. 

While the Florentine and Umbro-Tuscan mas- 
ters were perfecting the arts of accurate design, a 
similar direction toward scientific studies was given 
to the painters of Northern Italy at Padua. Michael 
Savonarola, writing his panegyric of Padua about 
1440, expressly mentions Perspective as a branch of 
philosophy taught in the high school f and the influ- 
ence of Francesco Squarcione, though exaggerated 
by Vasari, was not inconsiderable. This man, who 
began life as a tailor or embroiderer, was early in- 
terested in the fine arts. LikeCiriac of Ancona, he 
had a taste for travel and collection,^ visiting the 
sacred soil of Greece and sojourning in divers towns 

^ Two angels have recently been published by the Arundel Society, 
who have also copied Melozzo's wall-painting of Sixtus IV. in the 
Vatican. It is probable that the picture in the Royal Collection at 
Windsor, of Duke Frederick of Urbino listening to the lecture of a 
Humanist, is also a work of Melozzo's, much spoiled by repainting. 
See ' Revival of Learning,' p. 304. 

"^ Muratori, vol. xxiv. 1181. 

" For Ciriac of Ancona, see ' Revival of Learning,' p. 155. 



SCHOOL OF SQUARCIONE. 237 

of Italy, everywhere making drawings, copying pic- 
tures, taking casts from statues, and amassing mem- 
oranda on the reHcs of antiquity as well as on the 
methods practiced by contemporary painters. Equip- 
ped with these aids to study, Squarcione returned to 
Padua, his native place, where he opened a kind of 
school for painters. It is clear that he was himself 
less an artist than an amateur of painting, with a 
turn for teaching, and a conviction, based upon the 
humanistic instincts of his age, that the right way of 
learning was by imitation of the antique. During 
the course of his career he is said to have taught no 
less than 137 pupils, training his apprentices by the 
exhibition of casts and drawings, and giving them 
instruction in the science of perspective.* From his 
studio issued the mighty Andrea Mantegna, whose 
life-work, one of the most weighty moments in the 
history of modern art, will be noticed at length in 
the next chapter. For the present it is enough to 
observe that through Squarcione the scientific and 
humanistic movement of the fifteenth century was 
communicated to the art of Northern Italy. There, 
as at Florence, painting was separated from eccle- 
siastical tradition, and a new starting-point was 

^ The services rendered by Squarcione to art have been thoroughly 
discussed by Messrs. Crowe and Cavalcaselle, ' Painting in North 
Italy,' vol. i. chap. 2. I can not but think that they underrate the im- 
portance of his school. 



238 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY, 

sought in the study of mathematical principles, and 
the striving after form for its own sake. 

Without attempting the detailed history of paint- 
ing in this period of divided energy and diverse 
effort, it is needful here to turn aside and notice 
those masters of the fifteenth century who remained 
comparatively uninfluenced by the scholastic studies 
of their contemporaries. Of these, the earliest and 
most notable was Gentile da Fabriano, the last great 
painter of the Gubbian school.^ In the predella of 
his masterpiece at Florence there is a little panel, 
which attracts attention as one of the earliest at- 
tempts to represent a sunrise. The sun has just 
appeared above one of those bare sweeping hillsides 
so characteristic of Central Italian landscape. Part 
of the country lies untouched by morning, cold and 
gray : the rest is silvered with the level light, falling 
sidewise on the burnished leaves and red fruit of 
the orange-trees, and casting shadows from olive- 
branches on the furrows of a new-plowed field. 
Along the road journey Joseph and Mary and the 
infant Christ, so that you may call this little land- 
scape a Flight into Egypt, if you choose. Gentile, 
with all his Umbrian pietism, was a painter for 
whom the fair sights of the earth had exquisite value. 

^ He was bom between 1360 and 1370, and he settled at Florence 
about 1422, where he opened a bottega in S. Trinita. In 1423 he 
painted his masterpiece, the * Adoration of the Magi,' now exhibited 
in the Florentine Academy of Arts. 



GENTILE AND ANGELICO, 239 

The rich costumes of the Eastern kings, their train 
of servants, their hawks and horses, hounds and 
monkeys, are painted by him with scrupulous 
fidelity; and nothing can be more true to nature 
than the wild flowers he has copied in the frame- 
work of this picture. Yet we perceive that, though 
he felt in his own way the naturalistic impulse of the 
age, he had scarcely any thing in common with mas- 
ters like Uccello or Verocchio. 

Still less had Fra Angelico. Of all the painters 
of this period he most successfully resisted the per- 
suasions of the Renaissance, and perfected an art 
that owed little to sympathy with the external world. 
He thought it a sin to study or to imitate the naked 
form, and his most beautiful faces seem copied from 
angels seen in visions, not from any sons of men. 
While the artists around him were absorbed in 
mastering the laws of geometry and anatomy, Fra 
Angelico sought to express the inner life of the 
adoring soul. Only just so much of realism, whether 
in the drawing of the body and its drapery or in 
the landscape background, as seemed necessary for 
suggesting the emotion, or for setting forth the story, 
found its way into his pictures. The message they 
convey might have been told almost as perfectly 
upon the lute or viol. His world is a strange one 
— a world not of hills and fields and flowers and 
men of flesh and blood, but one where the people 



240 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY, 

are embodied ecstasies, the colors tints from evening 
clouds or apocalyptic jewels, the scenery a flood of 
light or a background of illuminated gold. His 
mystic gardens, where the ransomed souls embrace, 
and dance with angels on the lawns outside the City 
of the Lamb, are such as were never trodden by 
the foot of man in any paradise of earth. 

Criticism has a hard task in attempting to dis- 
cern the merit of the several painters of this time. 
It is clear that we must look not to Fra Angelico 
but to Masaccio for the progressive forces that 
were carrying art forward to complete accomplish- 
ment. Yet the charm of Masaccio is as nothing in 
comparison with that which holds us spell-bound 
before the sacred and impassioned reveries of the 
Fiesolan monk. Masaccio had inestimable value 
for his contemporaries. Fra Angelico, now that 
we know all Masaccio can teach, has a quality so 
unique that we return again and again to the con- 
templation of his visions. Thus it often happens 
that we are tempted to exaggerate the historical 
importance of one painter because he teaches us 
by some peculiar quality, and to overestimate the 
intrinsic value of another because he was a motive 
power in his own age. Both these temptations 
should be resolutely resisted by the student who is 
capable of discerning different kinds of excellence and 
diverse titles to affectionate remembrance. Tracing 



BENOZZO GOZZOLL 241 

the history of Italian painting is like pursuing a jour- 
ney down an ever-broadening river, whose affluents 
are Giotto and Masaccio, Ghirlandajo, Signorelli, 
and Mantegna. We have to turn aside and land upon 
the shore, in order to visit the heaven-reflecting lake- 
let, self-encompassed and secluded, called Angelico. 
Benozzo Gozzoli, the pupil of Fra Angelico, 
but in no sense the continuator of his tradition, 
exhibits the blending of several styles by a genius 
of less creative than assimilative force. That he 
was keenly interested in the problems of perspec- 
tive and foreshortening, and that none of the know- 
ledge collected by his fellow-workers had escaped 
him, is sufficiently proved by his frescoes at Pisa. 
His compositions are rich in architectural details, 
not always chosen with pure taste, but painted with 
an almost infantine delight in the magnificence of 
buildings. Quaint birds and beasts and reptiles 
crowd his landscapes ; while his imagination runs 
riot in rocks and rivers, trees of all variety, and 
rustic incidents adopted from real life. At the 
same time he felt an enjoyment like that of Gentile 
da Fabriano in depicting the pomp and circum- 
stance of pageantry, and no Florentine of the 
fifteenth century was more fond of assembling the 
personages of contemporary history in groups.* 

^ See, for instance, the valuable portraits of the Medicean family 
with Ficino and Poliziano, in the fresco of the * Tower of Babel ' at Pisa. 



242 RENAISSANCE IN ITAL V. 

Thus he showed himself sensitive to the chief in- 
fluences of the earlier Renaissance, and combined 
the scientific and naturalistic tendencies of his age 
in a manner not devoid of native poetry. What he 
lacked was depth of feeling, the sense of noble 
form, the originative force of a great mind. His 
poetry of invention, though copious and varied, 
owed its charm to the unstudied grace of improviza- 
tion, and he often undertook subjects where his 
idyllic rather than dramatic genius failed to sustain 
him. It is difficult, for instance, to comprehend 
how M. Rio could devote two pages to Gozzoli's 
Destrtiction of Sodom, so comparatively unimpres- 
sive in spite of its aggregated incidents, when he 
passes by the Fulminati of Signorelli, so tragic in 
its terrible simplicity, with a word.^ 

This painter's marvelous rapidity of execution 
enabled him to produce an almost countless series 
of decorative works. The best of these are the 
frescoes of the Pisan Campo Santo, of the Riccardi 
Palace at Florence, of San Gemignano, and of 
Montefalco. It has been well said of Gozzoli that, 
though he attempted grand subjects on a large 
scale, he could not rise above the limitations of a 
style better adapted to the decoration of Cassoni 
than to fresco.^ Yet within the range of his own 

* ' L'Ait Chretien,' vol. ii. p. 397. 

' The same remark might be made about the Venetian Bonifazio. 



IDYLLIC AND ROMANTIC FANCY. 243 

powers there are few more fascinating painters 
His feeling for fresh nature — for hunters in the 
woods at night or dawn, for vintage-gatherers 
among their grapes, for festival troops of cavaliers 
and pages, and for the marriage-dances of young 
men and maidens — ^yields a delightful gladness to 
compositions lacking the simplicity of Giotto and 
the dignity of Masaccio.^ No one knew better how 
to sketch the quarrels of little boys in their nursery, 
or the laughter of serving-women, or children carry- 
ing their books to school;^ and when the idyllic 
genius of the man was applied to graver themes, 
his fancy supplied him with multitudes of angels 
waving rainbow-colored wings above fair mortal 
faces. Bevies of them nestle like pigeons on the 
penthouse of the hut of Bethlehem, or crowd to- 
gether round the infant Christ.^ 

From these observations on the style of Benozzo 
Gozzoli it will be seen that in the evolution of Ke- 
lt is remarkable that the ' Adoration of the Magi ' was always a favor- 
ite subject with painters of this caliber. 

^ I may refer to the picture of the hunters in the Taylor Gallery at 
Oxford, the ' Vintage of Noah ' at Pisa, the attendants of the Magi in 
the Riccardi Palace, and the Carola in the ' Marriage of Jacob and 
Rachel ' at Pisa. 

"^ ' Stories of Isaac and Ishmael and of Jacob and Esau ' at Pisa, 
and ' Story of S, Augustine ' at San Gemignano. Nothing can be 
prettier than the school-children in the latter series. The group of 
the little boy, horsed upon a bigger boy's back for a whipping, is one of 
the most natural episodes in painting. 

' Riccardi Chapel. 



244 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY, 

naissance culture he may be compared with the 
romantic poets for whom the cheerfulness of nature 
and the joy that comes to men from living in a 
many-colored world of inexhaustible delight were 
sufficient sources of inspiration. It should be men- 
tioned lastly that he enjoyed the patronage and 
friendship of the Medicean princes. 

Another painter favored by the Medici was 
Fra Filippo Lippi, whose life and art-work were 
alike the deviation of a pleasure-loving tempera- 
ment from its natural sphere into the service of the 
Church. Left an orphan at the age of two years, 
he was brought up by an aunt, who placed him, 
as a boy of eight, in the convent of the Carmine 
at Florence. For monastic duties he had no voca- 
tion, and the irregularities of his behavior caused 
scandal even in that age of cynical indulgence. It 
can scarcely be doubted that the schism between 
his practice and profession served to debase and 
vulgarize a genius of fine imaginative quality, while 
the uncongenial work of decorating choirs and paint- 
ing altar-pieces limed the wings of his swift spirit 
with the dullness of routine that savored of hypoc- 
risy. Bound down to sacred subjects, he v\^as too 
apt to make angels out of street-urchins, and to 
paint the portraits of his peasant-loves for Virgins.^ 

* For an example, the picture of Madonna worshiping the infant 
Christ upheld by two little angels in the Uffizzi. 



FRA FILIPPO AT PRATO AND SPOLETO, 245 

His delicate sense of natural beauty gave peculiar 
charm to this false treatment of religious themes. 
Nothing, for example, can be more attractive than 
the rows of angels bearing lilies in his Coronation 
of the Virgin ; ^ and yet, when we regard them 
closely, we find that they have no celestial quality 
of form or feature. Their grace is earthly, and 
the spirit breathed upon the picture is the loveli- 
ness of color, quiet and yet glowing — blending 
delicate blues and greens with whiteness purged 
of glare. The beauties as well as the defects of 
such compositions make us regret that Fra Filippo 
never found a more congenial sphere for his imagi- 
nation. As a painter of subjects half-humorous 
and half-pathetic, or as the illustrator of romantic 
stories, we fancy that he might have won fame 
rivaled only by the greatest colorists. 

One such picture it was granted him to paint, 
and this is his masterpiece. In the prime of life 
he was commissioned to decorate the choir of the 
cathedral at Prato with the legends of S. John 
Baptist and S. Stephen. All of these frescoes are 
noteworthy for their firm grasp upon reality in the 
portraits of Florentine worthies, and for the har- 
monious disposition of the groups; but the scene 
of Salome dancing before Herod is the best for its 
poetic feeling. Her movement across the floor 

* In the Academy of Fine Arts at Florence. 



246 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

before the tyrant and his guests at table, the quaint 
fluttering of her drapery, the well-bred admiration 
of the spectators, their horror when she brings the 
Baptist's head to Herodias, and the weak face of 
the half-remorseful Herod are expressed with a 
dramatic power that shows the genius of a poet 
painter. And even more lovely than Salome are 
a pair of girls locked in each other's arms close 
by Herodias on the dais. A natural and spon- 
taneous melody, not only in the suggested move- 
ments of this scene, but also in the coloring, choice 
of form, and treatment of drapery, makes it one of 
the most musical of pictures ever painted. 

Fra Filippo was not so successful in the choir of 
the cathedral at Spoleto, where he undertook to paint 
scenes from the life of the Virgin. Yet those who 
have not examined these frescoes, ruinous in their 
decay and spoiled by stupid restoration, can form no 
just notion of the latent capacity of this great master. 
The whole of the half-dome above the tribune is 
filled with a Coronation of Madonna. A circular 
rainbow surrounds both her and Christ. She is 
kneeling with fiery rays around her, glorified by her 
assumption into heaven. Christ is enthroned, and 
at His side stands a seat prepared for His mother, as 
soon as the crown that He is placing on her head 
shall have made her Queen. From the outer courts 
of heaven, thronged with multitudes of celestial 



FIUPPINO LIPPL 247 

beings, angels are crowding in, breaking the lines of 
the prismatic aureole, as though the ardor of their 
joy could scarcely be repressed ; while the everlast- 
ing light of God sheds radiance from above, and far 
below Hes earth with diminished sun and moon. 
The boldness of conception in this singular fresco 
reveals a genius capable of grappling with such 
problems as Tintoretto solved Fra Filippo died at 
Spoleto, and left his work unfinished to the care of 
his assistant, the Fra Diamante. Over his tomb Lo- 
renzo de* Medici caused a monument to be erected, 
and Poliziano wrote Latin couplets to commemorate 
the fame of a painter highly prized by his patrons. 
The space devoted in these pages to Fra Lippo 
Lippi is justified not only by the excellence of his own 
work, but also by the influence he exercised over 
two of the best Florentine painters of the fifteenth 
century. Whether Filippino Lippi was in truth his 
son by Lucrezia Buti, a novice he is said to have 
carried from her cloister in Prato, has been called in 
question by recent critics ; but they adduce no posi- 
tive arguments for discrediting the story of Vasari.^ 
There can, however, be no doubt that to the Frate, 
whether he was his father or only his teacher, 
Filippino owed his style. His greatest works were 

^ Crowe and Cavalcaselle, vol. ii. chap. 19. Nothing was more 
common in the practice of Italian arts than for pupils to take their 
name from their masters, in the same way as they took them from 
their fathers, by the prefix di or otherwise. 



248 RENAISSANCE IN ITAL V. 

painted in continuation of Masaccio's frescoes in the 
Carmine at Florence. It is the best warrant of their 
excellence that we feel them worthy to hold the place 
they do, and that Raphael transferred one of their 
motives, the 5gure of S. Paul addressing S. Peter in 
prison, to his cartoon of Mars' Hill. That he was 
not so accomplished as Masaccio in the art of com- 
position, that his scale of color is less pleasing, and 
that his style in general lacks the elevation of his 
mighty predecessor, is not sufficient to place him in 
any position of humiliating inferiority.* What above 
all things interests the student of the Renaissance in 
Filippino's work is the powerful action of revived 
classicism on his manner. This can be traced better 
in the Caraffa Chapel of S. Maria sopra Minerva at 
Rome and in the Strozzi Chapel of S. Maria Novella 
at Florence than in the Carmine. The Triumph of 
S. Thomas Aquinas and the Miracle of S. John 
are remarkable for an almost insolent display of 
Roman antiquities — not studied, it need scarcely be 

* The most simply beautiful of Filippino's pictures is the oil-paint- 
ing in the Badia at Florence, which represents Madonna attended by- 
angels dictating the story of her life to S. Bernard. In this most 
lovely religious picture Filippino comes into direct competition with 
Perugino (see the same subject at Munich), without suffering by the 
contrast. The type of Our Lady, striven after by Botticelli and other 
masters of his way of feeling, seems to me more thoroughly attained 
by Filippino than by any of his fellow-workers. She is a woman 
acquainted with grief and nowise distinguished by the radiance of her 
beauty among the daughters of earth. It is measureless love for the 
mother of his Lord that makes S. Bernard bow before her with eyes of 
wistful adoration and hushed reverence. 



SANDRO BOTTICELLI. 249 

observed, with the scientific accuracy of Alma 
Tadema — for such science was non-existent in the 
fifteenth century — but paraded with a kind of 
passion. To this dehght in antique details Filip- 
pino added violent gestures, strained attitudes, 
and affected draperies, producing a general result 
impressive through the artist's energy, but quaint 
and unattractive. 

Jl^Sandro Botticelli, the other disciple of Fra Lippo, 
bears a name of greater mark. He is one of those 
artists much respected in their own days, who suf- 
fered eclipse from the superior splendor of imme- 
diate successors, and to whom, through sympathy 
stimulated by prolonged study of the fifteenth cen- 
tury, we have of late paid tardy and somewhat 
exaggerated honors.^ His fellow-workers seem to 
have admired him as an able draughtsman gifted 



1 "he study of the fine arts offers few subjects of more curious in- 
terest han the vicissitudes through which painters of the type of Bot- 
ticelli, lot absolutely and confessedly in the first rank, but attractive 
by reason of their relation to the spirit of their age, and of the seal of 
intimiii set upon their work, have passed. In the last century and 
the begnning of this, our present preoccupation with Botticelli would 
have pa-.sed for a mild lunacy, because he has none of the qualities then 
most in vogue and most enthusiastically studied, and because the 
moment n the history of culture he so faithfully represents was then 
but littleunderstood. The prophecy of Mr. Ruskin, the tendencies of 
our best rontemporary art in Mr. Burne Jones's painting, the specific 
note of (ur recent fashionable poetry, and, more than all, our delight 
in the deicately-poised psychological problems of the middle Renais- 
sance, hale evoked a kind of hero-worship for this excellent artist 
and true )oet. 



\/ 



250 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

with a rare if whimsical imagination ; but no one 
recognized in him a leader of his age. For us he 
has an almost unique value as representing the 
interminglement of antique and modern fancy at a 
moment of transition, as embodying in some of his 
pictures the subtlest thought and feeling of men for 
whom the classic myths were beginning to live once 
more, while new guesses were timidly hazarded in 
the sphere of orthodoxy.^ Self-confident sensuality 
had not as yet encouraged painters to substitute a 
florid rhetoric for the travail of their brain ; nor was 
enough known about antiquity to make the servile 
imitation of Greek or Roman fragments possible. 
Yet scholarship had already introduced a novel ele- 
ment into the culture of the nation. It was no 
doubt with a kind of wonder that the artists heard 
of Fauns and Sylvans, and the birth of Aphrodite 
from the waves. Such fables took deep hold upon 
their fancy, stirring them to strange and dedicate 
creations, the offspring of their own thought, aid no 

^ A friend writing to me from Italy speaks thus of Botticlli, and 
of the painters associated with him : ' When I ask myself wha it is I 
find fascinating in him — for instance, which of his pictures, or what 
element in them — I am forced to admit that it is the touch of aganism 
m him, the fairy-story element, the echo of abeatitifullapsed 7:ythoIogy 
which he has fouftd the means of tra?ts7nitti7ig* The worls I have 
printed in italics seem to me very true. At the same time we must 
bear in mind that the scientific investigation of nature had lot in the 
fifteenth century begun to stand between the sympathetic intellect and 
the outer world. There was still the possibility of that 'laped myth- 
ology,' the dream of pcets and the delight of artists, seening posi- 
tively the best form of expressio'; iOf ~.entiment:i aroused bynature. 



MYTHOLOGICAL SUBJECTS, 251 

mere copies of marbles seen in statue-galleries. The 
very imperfection of these pictures lends a value to 
them in the eyes of the student, by helping him to 
comprehend exactly how the revelations of the 
humanists affected the artistic sense of Italy. 

In the mythological work of Botticelli there is 
ahvays an element of allegory, recalling the Middle 
Agei3 and rendering it far truer to the feelings of the 
fifteenth century than to the myths it illustrates. 
His painting of the Spring, suggested by a passage 
from Lucretius/ is exquisitely poetic ; and yet the 
true spirit of the Latin verse has not been seized — 
to have done that would have taxed the energies of 
Titian — but something special to the artist and 
significant for Medicean scholarship has been added. 
There is none of the Roman largeness and freedom 
in its style ; Venus and her Graces are even some- 
what melancholy, and their movements savor of 
affectation. This combination or confusion of artistic 
impulses in Botticelli, this treatment of pagan themes 
in the spirit of mediaeval mysticism, sometimes ended 
in a bathos of grotesqueness. It might suffice to 
cite the pregnant Aphrodite in the National Gal- 
lery, if the Mars and Venus in the same collection 
were not even a more striking instance. Mars is a 
young Florentine, whose throat and chest are beau- 
tifully studied from the life, but whose legs and 

* De Rerum Naturd, lib. v. 737. 



252 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

belly, belonging no doubt to the same model, fall 
far short of heroic form. He lies fast asleep with 
the corners of his mouth drawn down, as though he 
were about to snore. Opposite there sits a woman, 
weary and wan, draped from neck to foot in the thin 
raiment Botticelli loved. Did we not know she was 
meant for Venus, we might take her for a Piagnone 
dressed up in fine clothes against the dictates of her 
conscience to oblige a worldly and now drunken 
husband. Four little goat-footed Cupids playing with 
the armor of the sleeping lad complete the com- 
position. These wanton loves are admirably con- 
ceived and exquisitely drawn ; nor indeed can any 
drawing exceed in beauty the line that leads from 
the flank along the ribs and arm of Mars up to his 
lifted elbow. The whole design, like one of Piero 
di Cosimo's pictures in another key, leaves a strong 
impression on the mind, due partly to the oddity of 
treatment, partly to the careful work displayed, and 
partly to the individuality of the artist. It gives us 
keen pleasure to feel exactly how a painter like 
Botticelli applied the dry naturalism of the early 
Florentine Renaissance, as well as his own original 
imagination, to a subject he imperfectly realized. 
But a Greek or a Roman would have rejected this 
picture as false to the mythus of Mars and Venus ; 
-and whether Botticelli wished it to be less descrip- 
tive than emblematic might be fairly questioned. 



BIRTH OF APHRODITE, 253 

At first sight the face and attitude of that unseduc- 
tive Venus, wide awake and melancholy opposite 
her snoring lover, seems to symbolize the indignities 
which women may have to endure from insolent and 
sottish boys with only youth to recommend them. 
This interpretation, however, sounds like satire. It 
is more respectful to presume that Botticelli failed, 
partly through inadequacy of means and partly 
through the sentimental reverence of his age for 
classic stories, to do the authorized version of the 
legend justice. 

Botticelli's Birth of Aphrodite expresses this 
transient moment in the history of the Renaissance 
with more felicity. It would be impossible for any 
painter to design a more exquisitely outlined figure 
than that of his Venus, who, with no covering but 
her golden hair, is wafted to the shore by zephyrs. 
Roses fall upon the ruffled waves, and the young 
gods of the air twine hands and feet together as 
they float. In the picture of Spring there is the 
same choice of form, the same purity of line, the 
same rare interlacement in the limbs. It would 
seem as though BotticelH intended every articulation 
of the body to express some meaning ; and this, 
though it enhances the value of his work for sym- 
pathetic students, often leads him to the verge of 
affectation. Nothing but a touch of affectation in 
the twined fingers of Raphael and Tobias impairs the 



254 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY, 

beauty of one of Botticelli's best pictures at Turin. 
We feel the same discord looking at them as we do 
while reading the occasional concetti in Petrarch ; 
and all the more in each case does the discord pain 
us because we know that it results from their specific 
quality carried to excess. 

Botticelli's sensibility to the refinements of draw- 
ing gave peculiar character to all his work. Atten- 
tion has frequently been called to the beauty of his 
roses.^ Every curl in their frail petals is rendered 
with as much care as though they were the hands or 
feet of Graces. Nor is it, perhaps, a mere fancy to 
imagine that the corolla of an open rose suggested 
to Botticelli's mind the composition of his best- 
known picture, the circular Coronation of the Virgin 
in the Uffizzi. That masterpiece combines all Bot- 
ticelli's best qualities. For rare distinction of beauty 
in the faces it is unique, while the mystic calm and 
resignation, so misplaced in his Aphrodites, find a 
meaning here.^ There is only one other picture in 

^ The rose-tree background in a Madonna belonging to Lord 
Elcho is a charming instance of the value given to flowers by careful 
treatment. 

"^ I can not bring myself to accept Mr. Pater's reading of the Ma- 
donna's expression. It seems to me that Botticelli meant to portray 
the mingled awe and tranquillity of a mortal mother chosen for the 
Son of God. He appears to have sometimes aimed at conveying more 
than painting can compass ; and since he had not Lionardo's genius, 
he gives sadness, moumfulness, or discontent for some more subtle 
mood. Next to the Madonna of Uffizzi, Botticelli's loveliest religious 
picture to my mind is the ' Nativity,' belonging to Mr. Fuller Maitland. 



PIERO DI COSIMO. 255 

Italy, a Madonna and Child with S. Catherine in 
a landscape by Boccaccino da Cremona, that in any 
degree rivals the peculiar beauty of its types.^ 

Sandro Botticelli was not a great painter in the 
same sense as Andrea Mantegna. But he was a 
true poet within the limits of a certain sphere. We 
have to seek his parallel among the verse-writers 
rather than the artists of his day. Some of the 
stanzas of Poliziano and Boiardo, in particular, might 
have been written to explain his pictures, or his pic- 
tures might have been painted to illustrate their 
verses.^ In both Poliziano and Boiardo we find the 
same touch upon antique things as in Botticelli ; and 
this makes him serviceable almost above all painters 
to the readers of Renaissance poetry. 

The name of Piero di Cosimo has been men- 
tioned incidentally in connection with that of Botti- 
celli ; and though his life exceeds the limits assigned 
for this chapter, so many links unite him to the class 



Poetic imagination in a painter has produced nothing more graceful 
and more tender than the dance of angels in the air above, and the 
embracement of the angels and the shepherds on the lawns below. 

^ In the Academy of Fine Arts at Venice. I do not mention this 
picture as a complete pendant to Botticelli's famous tondo. The faces 
of S. Catherine and Madonna, however, hav« something of the rarity 
that is so striking in that work. 

^ I might mention stanzas 122-124 of Poliziano's 'Giostra,' describ- 
ing Venus in the lap of Mars ; or stanzas 99-107, describing the birth 
of Venus ; and from Boiardo's ' Orlando Innamorato' I might quote 
the episode of Rinaldo's punishment by Love (lib. ii. canto xv. 43), a' 
the tale of Silvanella and Narcissus (lib. ii. canto xvii. 49). 



256 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY, 

of painters I have been discussing that I can find 
no better place to speak of him than this. His 
biography forms one of the most amusing chapters 
in Vasari, who has taken great delight in noting 
Piero's quaint humors and eccentric habits, and 
whose description of a Carnival triumph devised by 
him is one of our most precious documents in illus- 
tration of Renaissance pageantry.^ The point that 
connects him with Botticelli is the romantic treat- 
ment of classical mythology, best exemplified in his 
pictures of the tale of Perseus and Andromeda.^ 
Piero was by nature and employment a decorative 
painter ; the construction of cars for pageants, and 
the adornment of dwelling-rooms and marriage- 
chests, affected his whole style, rendering it less 
independent and more quaint than that of Botticelli. 
Landscape occupies the main part of his composi- 
tions, made up by a strange amalgam of the most 
eccentric details — rocks toppling over blue bays, 
sea-caverns, and fantastic mountain ranges. Groups 
of little figures disposed upon these spaces tell the 
story, and the best invention of the artist is lavished 
on the form of monstrous creatures like the dragon 
slain by Perseus. There is no attempt to treat the 
classic subject in a classic spirit : to do that, and to 

' I hope to make use of this passage in a future section of my work 
on the Italian Poetry of the Renaissance. Therefore I pass by this 
portion of Piero's art-work now. 

^ Uffizzi Gallery. 



THE DEAD PROCRIS, 257 

fail in doing it, remained for Cellini.^ We have, on 
the contrary, before us an image of the ore, as it 
appeared to Ariosto's fancy — a creature borrowed 
from romance and made to play its part in a Greek 
myth. The same criticism applies to Piero's picture 
of the murdered Procris watched by a Satyr of the 
woodland.^ In creating his Satyr the painter has 
not had recourse to any antique bass-relief, but has 
imagined for himself a being half human, half bestial, 
and yet wholly real ; nor has he portrayed in Pro- 
cris a nymph of Greek form, but a girl of Florence. 
The strange animals and gaudy flowers introduced 
into the landscape background further remove the 
subject from the sphere of classic treatment. Flor- 
entine realism and quaint fancy being thus curiously 
blended, the artistic result may be profitably studied 
for the light it throws upon the so-called paganism 
of the earlier Renaissance. Fancy at that moment 
was more free than when superior knowledge of 
antiquity had created a demand for reproductive art, 
and when the painters thought less of the meaning 
of the fable for themselves than of its capability of 
being used as a machine for the display of erudition. 
It remains to speak of the painter who closes 
and at the same time gathers up the whole tradition 

' See the bass-relief upon the pedestal of his ' Perseus ' in the 
Loggia de' Lanzi. 

"^ In the National Gallery. 



258 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

of this period. Domenico Ghirlandajo deserves this 
place of honor not because he had the keenest in- 
tuitions, the deepest thought, the strongest passion, 
the subtlest fancy, the loftiest imagination — for in all 
these points he was excelled by some one or other 
of his contemporaries or predecessors — but because 
his intellect was the most comprehensive and his 
mastery of art the most complete. His life lasted 
from 1449 to 1498, and he did not distinguish him- 
self as a painter till he was past thirty.^ Therefore 
he does not properly fall within the limit of 1470, 
assigned roughly to this age of transition in painting. 
But in style and spirit he belonged to it, resuming 
in his own work the qualities we find scattered 
through the minor artists of the fifteenth century, 
and giving them the unity of fusion in a large and 
lucid manner. Like the painters hitherto discussed, 
he was working toward the full Renaissance ; yet he 
reached it neither in ideality nor in freedom. His 
art is the art of the understanding only ; and to this 
the masters of the golden age added radiance, sub- 
limity, grace, passion — qualities of the imagination 
beyond the scope of men like Ghirlandajo. 

It is almost with reluctance that a critic feels 
obliged to name this powerful but prosaic painter as 

' His family name was Domenico di Currado di Doffo Bigordi. 
He probably worked during his youth and early manhood as a gold- 
smith, and got his artist's name from the trade of making golden chap- 
lets for the Florentine women. See Vasari, vol. v. p. 66. 



DOM EN ICO GHIRLANDAJO. 259 

the Giotto of the fifteenth century in Florence, the 
tutelary angel of an age inaugurated by Masaccio. 
He was a consummate master of the science col- 
lected by his predecessors. No one surpassed him 
in the use of fresco. His orderly composition, in 
the distribution of figures and the use of architec- 
tural accessories, is worthy of all praise ; his por- 
traiture is dignified and powerful '} his choice of form 
and treatment of drapery noble. Yet we can not help 
noting his deficiency in the finer sense of beauty, the 
absence of poetic inspiration or feeling in his work, 
the commonplaceness of his color, and his weari- 
some reiteration of calculated effects. He never 
arrests attention by sallies of originality, or charms 
us by the delicacies of suggestive fancy. He is 
always at the level of his own achievement, so that 
in the end we are as tired with able Ghirlandajo as 
the men of Athens with just Aristides. Who, how- 
ever, but Ghirlandajo could have composed the fres- 
coes of ^. Fina at S. Gemignano, the fresco of the 
Death of S, Francis in S. Trinity at Florence, or that 
again of the Birth of the Virgin in S. Maria Novella ? 
There is something irritating in pure common sense 
imported into art, and Ghirlandajo's masterpieces 
are the apotheosis of that quality. How correct, 

^ What, after all, remains the grandest quality of Ghirlandajo is 
his powerful drawing of characteristic heads. They are as various as 
they are vigorous. What a nation of strong men must the Florentines 
have been ! we feel while gazing at his frescoes. 



26o RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

how judicious, how sagacious, how mathematically 
ordered ! we exclaim ; but we gaze without emotion, 
and we turn aw^ay w^ithout regret It does not vex us 
to read how Ghirlandajo used to scold his prentices 
for neglecting trivial orders that would fill his purse 
with money. Similar traits of character pain us with 
a sense of impropriety in Perugino. They har- 
monize with all we feel about the work of Ghirlan- 
dajo. It is bitter mortification to know that Michael 
Angelo never found space or time sufficient for his 
vast designs in sculpture. It is a positive relief to 
think that Ghirlandajo sighed in vain to have the 
circuit of the walls of Florence given him to paint. 
How he would have covered them with composi- 
tions, stately, flowing, easy, sober, and incapable of 
stirring any feeling in the soul ! 

Though Ghirlandajo lacked almost every true 
poetic quality, he combined the art of distributing 
figures in a given space, with perspective, fair know- 
ledge of the nude, and truth to nature, in greater 
perfection than any other single painter of the age he 
represents ; and since these were precisely the gifts of 
that age to the great Renaissance masters, we accord 
to him the place of historical honor. It should be 
added that, like almost all the artists of this epoch, he 
handled sacred and profane, ancient and modern, 
subjects in the same style, introducing contemporary 
customs and costumes. His pictures are therefore 



SUPREMACY OF FLORENCE, 261 

valuable for their portraits and their illustration of 
Florentine life. Fresco was his favorite vehicle ; and 
in this preference he showed himself a true master of 
the school of Florence : but he is said to have main- 
tained that mosaic, as more durable, was superior to 
wall-painting. This saying, if it be authentic, justifies 
our criticism of his cold achievement as a painter. 

Reviewing the ground traversed in this and the 
last chapter, we find that the painting of Tuscany, 
and in particular the Florentine section of it, has 
absorbed attention. It is characteristic of the next 
age that other districts of Italy began to contribute 
their important quota to the general culture of the 
nation. The force generated in Tuscany expanded 
and dilated till every section of the country took 
part in the movement which Florence had been first 
to propagate. What was happening in scholarship 
began to manifest itself in art, for the same law 
of growth and distribution affected both alike ; and 
thus the local differences of the Italians were to 
some extent abolished. The nation, never destined 
to acquire poHtical union in the Renaissance, pos- 
sessed at last an intellectual unity in its painters and 
its students, which justifies our speaking of the great 
men of the golden period as Italians and not as 
citizens of such or such a burgh. In the Middle 
Ages United Italy was an Idea to theorists like 
Dante, who dreamed for her an actual supremacy 



262 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY, 

beneath her Emperor's sway in Rome. The reason- 
ing to which they trusted proved fallacious, and their 
hopes were quenched. Instead of the political empire 
of the De Monarchia, a spiritual empire had been 
created, and the Italians were never more powerful 
in Europe than when their sacred city was being 
plundered by the imperial bandits in 1527. It is 
necessary, at the risk of some repetition, to keep this 
point before the reader, if only as an apology for the 
method of treatment to be followed in the next 
chapter, where the painters of the mid-Renaissance 
period will be reviewed less in relation to their 
schools and cities than as representatives of the 
Italian spirit. 

Since the intellectual unity gained by the Italians 
in the age of the Renaissance was chiefly due to the 
Florentines, it is a matter of some moment to re- 
consider the direct influences brought to bear upon 
the arts in Florence during the fifteenth century. I 
have chosen Ghirlandajo as the representative of 
painting in that period. I have also expressed the 
opinion that his style is singularly cold and prosaic, 
and have hinted that this prosaic and cold quality 
was caused by a defect of emotional enthusiasm, by 
preoccupation with finite aims. Herein Ghirlandajo 
did but reflect the temper of his age — that temper 
which Cosimo de' Medici, the greatest patron of both 
art and scholarship in Florence before 1470, repre- 



MEDICEAN INFLUENCE, 263 

sented in his life and in his public policy. It con- 
cerns us, therefore, to take into account the nature 
of the patronage extended by the Medici to art. 
Excessive praise and blame have been showered 
upon these burgher princes in almost equal quan- 
tities ; so that, if we were to place Roscoe and Rio, 
as the representatives of conflicting views, in the 
scales together, they would balance each other, and 
leave the index quivering. This bare statement 
warns the critic to be cautious, and inclines him to 
accept the intermediate conclusion that neither the 
Medici nor the artists could escape the conditions of 
their century. It is specially argued on the one 
hand against the Medici that they encouraged a sen- 
sual and worldly style of art, employing the painta.i 
to decorate their palaces with nude figures, arJ: 
luring them away from sacred to profane subjects. 
Yet Cosimo gave orders to Donatello for his David 
and his Judith, employed Michellozzo and Brunel- 
leschi to build him convents and churches, and filled 
the library of S. Marco, where Fra Angelico was 
painting, with a priceless collection of MSS. His 
own private chapel was decorated by Benozzo Goz- 
zoli. Fra Lippo Lippi and Michael Angelo Buonar- 
roti were the house-friends of Lorenzo de' Medici.. 
Leo Battista Alberti was a member of his philo- 
sophical society. The only great Florentine artist 
who did not stand in cordial relations tO the Medi- 



^64 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY, 

cean circle was Lionardo da Vinci. This sufficiently 
shows that the Medicean patronage was commen- 
surate with the best products of Florentine genius ; 
nor would it be easy to demonstrate that encourage- 
ment, so largely exhibited and so intelligently used, 
could have been in the main injurious to the arts. 

There is, however, a truth in the old grudge 
against the Medicean princes. They enslaved Flor- 
ence ; and even painting was not slow to suffer from 
the stifling atmosphere of tyranny. Lorenzo delib- 
erately set himself to enfeeble the people by luxury, 
partly because he liked voluptuous living, partly 
because he aimed at popularity, and partly because it 
was his interest to enervate republican virtues. The 
arts, used for the purposes of decoration in triumphs 
and carnival shows, became the instruments of 
careless pleasure ; and there is no doubt that even 
earnest painters lent their powers with no ill-will 
and no bad conscience to the service of lascivious 
patrons. * Per la citta, in diverse case, fece tondi di 
sua mano e femmine ignude assai,' says Vasari about 
Sandro Botticelli, who afterward became a Piagnone 
and refused to touch a pencil.^ We may, therefore, 
reasonably concede that if the Medici had never 
taken hold on Florence, or if the spirit of the times 
had made them other than they were in loftiness of 

' In many houses he painted roundels with his own hand, and 
of naked women plenty. 



LOW STANDARD OF THE AGE. 265 

aim and nobleness of heart, the arts of Italy in the 
Renaissance might have shown less of worldliness 
and materialism. It was against the demoralization 
of society by paganism, as against the enslavement 
of Florence by her tyrants, that Savonarola strove ; 
and since the Medici were the leaders of the clas- 
sical revival, as well as the despots of the dying 
commonwealth, they justly bear the lion's share of 
that blame which fell in general upon the vices of 
their age denounced by the prophet of S. Marco. 
We may regard it either as a singular misfortune for 
Italy or as the strongest sign of deep-seated Italian 
corruption, that the most brilliant leaders of culture 
both at Florence and at Rome — Cosimo, Lorenzo, 
and Giovanni de' Medici — promoted rather than 
checked the debasing influences of the Renaissance, 
and added the weight of their authority to the 
popular craving for sensuous amusement. 

Meanwhile, what was truly great and noble in 
Renaissance Italy, found its proper home in Flor- 
ence ; where the spirit of freedom, if only as an 
idea, still ruled ; where the populace was still capable 
of being stirred to supersensual enthusiasm ; and 
where the flame of the modem intellect burned 
with its purest, whitest luster. 



CHAPTER VI. 

PAINTING. 

Two Periods in the True Renaissance — Andrea Mantegna — His 
Statuesque Design — His Naturalism — Roman Inspiration — 
Triumph of Julius Caesar — Bass-Reliefs — Luca Signorelli — The Pre- 
cursor of Michael Angelo — Anatomical Studies — Sense of Beauty 
— The Chapel of S. Brizio at Orv'ieto — Its Arabesques and Medal- 
lions — Degrees in his Ideal — Enthusiasm for Organic Life — Mode 
of treating Classical Subjects — Perugino — His Pietistic Style — His 
Formalism — The Psychological Problem of his Life — Perugino's 
Pupils — Pinturicchio — At Spello and Siena — Francia — Fra Barto- 
lommeo — Transition to the Golden Age — Lionardo da Vinci — The 
Magician of the Renaissance — Raphael — The Melodist — Correggio 
— The Faun— Michael Angelo — The Prophet. 

The Renaissance, so far as Painting is concerned, 
may be said to have culminated between the years 
1470 and 1550. These dates, it must be frankly 
admitted, are arbitrary ; nor is there any thing more 
unprofitable than the attempt to define by strict 
chronology the moments of an intellectual growth 
so complex, so unequally progressive, and so varied 
as that of Italian art. All that the historian can 
hope to do is to strike a mean between his reckon- 
ing of years and his more subtle calculations based 
on the emergence of decisive genius in special men. 
An instance of such compromise is afforded by 
Lionardo da Vinci, who belongs, as far as dates 



CHRONOLOGY OF ITALIAN ART, 267 

go, to the last half of the fifteenth century, but 
who must, on any estimate of his achievement, 
be classed with Michael Angelo among the final 
and supreme masters of the full Renaissance. To 
violate the order of time, with a view to what 
may here be called the morphology of Italian art, 
is, in his case, a plain duty. 

Bearing this in mind, it is still possible to regard 
the eighty years above mentioned as a period no 
longer of promise and preparation, but of fulfillment 
and accomplishment. Furthermore, the thirty years 
at the close of the fifteenth century may be taken 
as one epoch in this climax of the art, while the 
first half of the sixteenth forms a second. Within 
the former falls the best work of Mantegna, Peru- 
gino, Francia, the Bellini, Signorelli, Fra Barto- 
lommeo. To the latter we may reckon Michael 
Angelo, Raphael, Giorgione, Correggio, Titian, and 
Andrea del Sarto. Lionardo da Vinci, though be- 
longing chronologically to the former epoch, ranks 
first among the masters of the latter ; and to this 
also may be given Tintoretto, though his life ex- 
tended far beyond it to the last years of the century. 
We thus obtain, within the period of eighty years 
from 1470 to 1550, two subordinate divisions of 
time, the one includmg the last part of the fifteenth 
century, the other extending over the best years of 
the sixteenth. 



268 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

The subdivisions I have just suggested cor- 
respond to two distinct stages in the evolution of 
art. The painters of the earlier group win our 
admiration quite as much by their aim as by their 
achievement. Their achievement, indeed, is not so 
perfect but that they still make some demand upon 
interpretative sympathy in the student. There is, 
besides, a sense of reserved strength in their work. 
We feel that their motives have not been developed 
to the utmost, that their inspiration is not exhausted ; 
that it will be possible for their successors to ad- 
vance beyond them on the same path, not realizing 
more consummate excellence in special points, but 
combining divers qualities, and reaching absolute 
freedom. 

The painters of the second group display 
mastery more perfect, range of faculty more all- 
embracing. What they design they do ; nature and 
art obey them equally ; the resources placed at 
their command are employed with facile and un- 
fettered exercise of power. The hand obedient 
to the brain is now so expert that nothing further 
is left to be desired in the expression of the artist's 
thought.^ The student can only hope to penetrate 

* ' La man che ubbedisce ail' intelletto ' is a phrase pregnant with 
meaning, used by Michael Angelo in one of his sonnets. See Guasti, 
'Le Rime di Michael Angelo,' p. 173. Michael Angelo's blunt criti- 
cism of Perugino, that he was goffo, a fool in art, and his rude speech 
to Francia's handsome son, that his father made better forms by night 



7 IVO PERIODS OF THE TRUE RENAISSANCE. 269 

the ma?iers meaning. To imagine a step further 
in the s^me direction is impossible. The full 
flower of the Italian genius has been unfolded. 
Its message to the world in art has been de- 
livered. 

Chronology alone would not justify us in draw- 
ing these distinctions. What really separates the two 
groups is the diff("rent degree in which they severally 
absorbed the spiri. and uttered the message of their 
age. In the former the Renaissance was still imma- 
ture, in the latter it v^as perfected. Yet all these 
painters deserve in a l.'-ue sense to be called its 
children. Their common o^iect is art regarded as an 
independent function, and reJieved from the bondage 
of technical impediments. lu their work the liberty 
of the modern mind Ends its firs^ and noblest expres* 
sion. They deal with familial and time-honored 
Christian motives reverently ; bu*- they use them at 
the same time for the exhibit'oir of pure human 
beauty. Pagan influences yield them spirit-stirring 
inspiration ; y<^t the antique models of style, which 
proved no less embarrassing to their srxccessors than 
SauFs armor was to David, weigh lightly, like a 
magician's breastplate, upon their heroic strength. 

Andrea Mantegna was born near Padua ^n 1431. 
Vasari says that in his boyhood he herded cattle, 

than day, sufficiently indicate the different aims pursued by the paintt'f 
of the two periods distinguished above. 



27© RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. ' 

and it is probable that he was the son of a small 
Lombard farmer. What led him to the study of 
the arts we do not know ; but that his talents were 
precociously developed is proved by his registra- 
tion in 1 44 1 upon the books of the painters' guild 
at Padua. He is there described as the adopted 
son of Squarcione. At the age of seventeen he 
signed a picture with his name. Studying the casts 
and drawings collected by Squarcione for his Pa- 
duan school, the young Mantegna found congenial 
exercise for his peculiar gifts.^ His early frescoes 
in the Eremitani at Padua look as though they had 
been painted from statues or clay models, carefully 
selected for the grandeur of their forms, the nobility 
of their attitudes, and the complicated beauty of 
their drapery. The figures, arranged on different 
planes, are perfect in their perspective ; the action 
is indicated by appropriate gestures, and the color- 
ing, though faint and cold, is scientifically calcu- 

' Though Mantegna seems to have owed all his training to Padua, 
it is impossible to regaid him as what is called a Squarcionesque — one 
among the artistic hacks formed and employed by the Paduan impre- 
sario of third-rate pamting. No other eagle like to him was reared in 
that nest. His greatness belonged to his own genius, assimilating 
from the meager means of study within his reach those elements 
which enabled him to divine the spirit of the antique and to attempt 
its reproduction. In order to facilitate the explanation of the problem 
offered by his early command of style, it has been suggested with 
great show of reason that he received a strong impression from the 
work executed in bass-relief by Donatello for the church of S. Antonio 
at Padua. Thus Florentine influences helped to form even the original 
genius of this greatest of the Lombard masters. 



ANDREA MANTEGNA. 271 

lated. Yet not a man or woman in these wondrous 
compositions seems to live. Well provided with 
bone and muscle, they have neither blood nor any 
thing suggestive of the breath of life within them. 
It is as though Mantegna had been called to paint 
a people turned to stone, arrested suddenly amid 
their various occupations, and preserved for cen- 
turies from injury in some Egyptian solitude of 
dewless sand. 

In spite of this unearthly immobility, the Pa- 
duan frescoes exercise a strange and potent spell. 
We feel ourselves beneath the sway of a gigantic 
genius, intent on solving the severest problems of 
his art in preparation for the portraiture of some 
high intellectual abstraction. It should also be 
observed that, notwithstanding their frigidity 
and statuesque composure, the pictures of S, 
Andrew and S, Christopher in the chapel of the 
Eremitani reveal minute study of real objects. 
Transitory movements of the body are noted 
and transcribed with merciless precision ; an Italian 
hillside, with its olive-trees and winding ways and 
crown of turrets, forms the background of one 
scene ; in another the drama is localized amid Re- 
naissance architecture of the costliest style. Rustic 
types have been selected for the soldiers, and com- 
monplace details, down to a patched jerkin or a 
broken shoe, bear witness to the patience and the 



272 RENAISSANCE IN ITAL F. 

observation of the master. But over all these things 
the glamour of Medusa's head has fallen, turning 
them to stone. We are clearly in the presence of 
a painter for whom the attractions of nature were 
subordinated to the fascinations of science — a man 
the very opposite, for instance, to Benozzo Gozzoli. 
If Mantegna had passed away in early manhood, 
like Masaccio, his fame would have been that of 
a cold and calculating genius laboring after an 
ideal unrealized except in its dry formal elements. 

The truth is that Mantegna's inspiration was de- 
rived from the antique.^ The beauty of classical bass- 
relief entered deep into his soul and ruled his imagi- 
nation. In later life he spent his acquired wealth 
in forming a collection of Greek and Roman anti- 
quities.^ He was, moreover, the friend of students, 
eagerly absorbing the knowledge brought to light 
by Ciriac of Ancona, Flavio Biondo, and other 
antiquaries; and so completely did he assimilate 
the materials of scholarship that the spirit of a 

* Vasari, vol. v. p. 163, maybe consulted with regard to Mantegna's 
preference for the ideal of statuary, when compared with natural 
beauty, as the model for a painter. 

"^ See Crowe and Cavalcaselle's ' History of Painting in North 
Italy,' vol. i. p. 334, for an account of his antiquarian researches in 
company with Felice Feliciano. His museum was so famous that in 
1483 Lorenzo de' Medici, passing through Mantua from Venice, thought 
it worthy of a visit. In his old age Mantegna fell into pecuniary diffi- 
culties, and had to part with his collection. The forced sale of its 
chief ornament, a bust of Faustina, is said to have broken his heart. 
If- i). 415- 



TRIUMPH OF JULIUS CjESAR, 273 

Roman seemed to be re-incarnated in him. Thus, 
independently of his high value as a painter, he 
embodies for us in art that sincere passion for the 
ancient world which was the dominating intellec- 
tual impulse of his age. 

The minute learning accumulated in the fifteenth 
century upon the subject of Roman military life 
found noble illustration in his frieze oi Julius CcBsar's 
Triumph} Nor is this masterpiece a cold display 
of pedantry. The life we vainly look for in the 
frescoes of the Eremitani chapel may be found here 
— statuesque, indeed, in style and stately in move- 
ment, but glowing with the spirit of revived anti- 
quity. The processional pomp of legionaries bowed 
beneath their trophied arms, the monumental majesty 
of robed citizens, the gravity of stoled and veiled 
priests, the beauty of young slaves, and all the para- 
phernalia of spoils and wreaths and elephants and 
ensigns, are massed together with the self-restraint 
of noble art subordinating pageantry to rules of lofty 
composition. What must the genius of the man 
have been who could move thus majestically beneath 
the weight of painfully-accumulated erudition, con- 
verting an antiquarian motive into a theme for 

* Painted on canvas m tempera for the Marquis of Mantua, before 
1488, looted by the Germans in 1630, sold to Charles I., resold by the 
Commonwealth, bought back by Charles II., and now exposed, much 
spoiled Dy time and change, but more by villainous repainting, on the 
walls of Hampton Court. 



274 RENAISSANCE IN ITAL V. 

melodies of line composed in the grave Dorian 
mood ? 

By no process can the classic purity of this bass- 
relief be better understood than by comparing the 
original with a transcript made by Rubens from a 
portion of the Triumph} The Flemish painter 
strives to add richness to the scene by Bacchanalian 
riot and the sensuality of imperial Rome. His ele- 
phants twist their trunks, and trumpet to the din oi 
cymbals ; negroes feed the flaming candelabra with 
scattered frankincense ; the white oxen of Clitum- 
nus are loaded with gaudy flowers, and the dancing 
maidens are disheveled Maenads. But the rhythmic 
procession of Mantegna, modulated to the sound 
of flutes and soft recorders, carries our imagination 
back to the best days and strength of Rome. His 
priests and generals, captives and choric women, are 
as little Greek as they are modern. In them awakes 
to a new life the spirit-quelling energy of the re- 
public. The painter's severe taste keeps out of 
sight the insolence and orgies of the empire ; he 
conceives Rome as Shakspere did in Corzolanus? 

In compositions of this type, studied after bass- 
reliefs and friezes, Mantegna displayed a power that 
was unique. Those who have once seen his draw- 

* An oil-painting in the National Gallery. 

^ The so-called ' Triumph of Scipio ' in the National Gallery seems 
to me in every respect feebler than the Hampton Court Cartoons. 



MANTEGNA'S BIOGRAPHY. 275 

ings for Judith with the head of Holofernes, and for 
Solomon judging between the two mothers, will 
never forget their sculpture. The lines are graven 
on our memory. When this marble master chose to 
be tragic, his intensity was terrible. The designs 
for a dead Christ carried to the tomb among the 
weeping Marys concentrate within the briefest 
space the utmost agony ; it is as though the very 
ecstasy of grief had been congealed and fixed for- 
ever. What, again, he could produce of purely 
beautiful within the region of religious arts is shown 
by his Madonna of the Victory} No other painter 
has given to the soldier saints forms at once so 
heroic and so chivalrously tender. 

With regard to the circumstances of Mantegna's 
biography, it may be said briefly that, though of 
humble birth, he spent the greater portion of his life 
at Court and in the service of princes. It was in 
1456, after he had distinguished himself by the 

^ The 'Madonna della Vittoria,' now in the Louvre Gallery, was 
painted to commemorate the achievements of Francesco Gonzaga in 
the battle of Fornovo. That Francesco, General of the Venetian 
troops, should have claimed that action, the eternal disgrace of Italian 
soldiery, for a victory, is one of the strongest signs of the depth to 
which the sense of military honor had sunk in Italy. But though 
the occasion of its painting was so mean, the impression made by this 
picture is too powerful to be described. It is in every detail grandiose : 
masculine energy being combined with incomparable grace, religious 
feeling with athletic dignity, and luxuriance of ornamentation with 
severe gravity of composition. It is worth comparing this portrait 
of Francesco Gonzaga with his bronze medal, just as Piero della 
Francesco's picture of Sigismondo Malatesta should be compared 
Willi Pisanello's medallion. 



..76 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY, 

Paduan frescoes, that he first received an invitation 
from the Marquis Lodovico Gonzaga. Of this 
sovereign I have already had occasion to speak.^ 
Reared by Vittorino da Feltre, to whom his father 
had committed almost unlimited authority, Lodo- 
vico had early learned to estimate the real ad- 
vantages of culture. It was now his object to 
render his capital no less illustrious by art than by 
the residence of learned men. With this view he 
offered Mantegna a salary of fifteen ducats a month, 
together with lodging, corn, and fuel — provided the 
painter would place his talents at his service. Man- 
tegna accepted the invitation ; but numerous engage- 
ments prevented him from transferring his household 
from Padua to Mantua until the year 1460. From 
that date onward to 1506, when he died, Man- 
tegna remained attached to the Gonzaga family, 
serving three Marquises in succession, and adorning 
their palaces, chapels, and country-seats with frescoes 
now, alas! almost entirely ruined. The grants of 
land and presents he received in addition to his 
salary enabled him to build a villa at Buscoldo, 
where he resided during the summer, as well as to 
erect a sumptuous mansion in the capital. 

Between Mantua, Goito, and Buscoldo, Man- 
tegna spent the last forty-six years of his life in con- 
tinual employment, broken only by a short visit to 

' * Revival of Learning/ p. 293. 



HIS CHARACTER AND PORTRAIT, 277 

Florence in 1466, and another to Bologna in 1472/ 
and by a longer residence in Rome between the 
years 1488 and 1490. During the latter period 
Innocent VIII. was Pope. He had built a chapel 
in the Belvedere of the Vatican, and wished the 
greatest painter of the day to decorate it. There- 
fore he wrote to Francesco, Marquis of Mantua, 
requesting that he might avail himself of Mantegna's 
skill. Francesco, though unwilling to part with his 
painter in ordinary, thought it unadvisable to disap- 
point the Pope. Accordingly he dubbed Mantegna 
knight, and sent him to Rome. The chapel painted 
in fresco for Innocent was ruthlessly destroyed by 
Pius VI. ; and thus the world has lost one of Man- 
tegna's masterpieces, executed while his genius was 
at its zenith. On his return to Mantua he finished 
the decorations of the Castello of the Gonzaghi,and 
completed his greatest surviving work, the Triumph 
of Julius CcBsar. 

By his wife, Nicolosia, the sister of Giovanni 
and Gentile Bellini, Mantegna had several children, 
one of whom, Francesco, adopted painting as a 
trade. The great artist was by temper arrogant 
and haughty ; nor could he succeed in living peace- 

* Nothing is known about Mantegna's stay in Florence. He went 
to meet the Cardinal Francesco Gonzaga at Bologna. This Cardinal, 
a great amateur of music and connoisseur in relics of antiquity, came to 
Mantua in August, 1472, where the 'Orfeo' of Messer Angelo Poli- 
ziano was produced for his amusement. 



278 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY, 

ably with any of his neighbors. It appears that he 
spent habitually more money than he could well 
afford, freely indulging his taste for magnificence, 
and disbursing large sums in the purchase of curiosi- 
ties. Long before his death, his estate had been 
involved in debt; and after his decease, his sons 
were forced to sell the pictures in his studio for the 
payment of pressing creditors. He was buried in 
Alberti's church of S. Andrea at Mantua, in a chapel 
decorated at his own expense. Over the grave was 
placed a bronze bust, most noble in modeling and 
perfect in execution. The broad forehead with its 
deeply-cloven furrows, the stern and piercing eyes, 
the large lips compressed with nervous energy, the 
massive nose, the strength of jaw and chin, and the 
superb clusters of the hair escaping from a laurel- 
wreath upon the royal head, are such as realize for 
us our notion of a Roman in the days of the Re- 
public. Mantegna's own genius has inspired this 
masterpiece, which tradition assigns to the medalist 
Sperando Maglioli. Whoever wrought it must have 
felt the incubation of the mighty painter's spirit, and 
have striven to express in bronze the character of 
his uncompromising art. 

Of a different temperament, yet not wholly un- 
like Mantegna in a certain iron strength of artistic 
character, was Luca Signorelli, born about 1441 at 
Cortona. The supreme quality of Mantegna was 



LUC A SIGNORELLI. 279 

Studied purity of outline, severe and heightened 
style. As Landor is distinguished by concentration 
above all the English poets who have made trial of 
the classic Muse, so Mantegna holds a place apart 
among Italian painters because of his stern Roman 
self-control. Signorelli, on the contrary, made his 
mark by boldness, pushing experiment almost be- 
yond the verge of truth, and approaching Michael 
Angelo in the hardihood of his endeavor to outdo 
nature. Vasari says of him that ' even Michael 
Angelo imitated the manner of Luca, as every one 
can see ; ' and indeed Signorelli anticipated the 
greatest master of the sixteenth century not only in 
his profound study of human anatomy, but also in 
his resolution to express high thought and tragic 
passion by pure form, discarding all the minor 
charms of painting. Trained in the severe school of 
Piero della Francesca, he early learned to draw 
from the nude with boldness and accuracy ; and to 
this point, too much neglected by his predecessors, 
he devoted the full powers of his maturity. Anat- 
omy he practiced, according to the custom of those 
days, in the graveyard or beneath the gibbet. There 
is a drawing by him in the Louvre of a stalwart 
man carrying upon his back the corpse of a youth. 
Both are naked. The motive seems to have been 
taken from some lazar-house. Life-long study of 
perspective in its application to the drawing of the 



28o RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

figure made the difficulties of foreshortening and 
the delineation of brusque attitude mere child's play 
to this audacious genius. The most rapid move- 
ment, the most perilous contortion of bodies falling 
through the air or flying, he depicted with hard, 
firmly-traced, unerring outline. If we dare to criti- 
cise the productions of a master so original and 
so accomplished, all we can say is that Signorelli 
reveled almost too wantonly in the display of hazard- 
ous posture, and that he sacrificed the passion of his 
theme to the display of science.^ Yet his genius 
comprehended great and tragic subjects, and to 
him belongs the credit in an age of ornament and 
pedantry of having made the human body a lan- 
guage for the utterance of all that is most weighty 
in the thought of man. 

A story is told by Vasari which brings Signorelli 
very close, to our sympathy, and enables us to un- 
derstand the fascination of pure form he felt so 
deeply. * It is related of Luca that he had a son 
killed at Cortona, a youth of singular beauty in face 
and person, whom he had tenderly loved. In his 
grief the father caused the boy to be stripped naked, 
and with extraordinary constancy of soul, uttering 
no complaint and shedding no tear, he painted the 

' That he could conceive a stern and tragic subject, with all the 
passion it required, is. however, proved not only by the frescoes at 
Orvieto, but also by the powerful oil-painting of the ' Crucifixion ' at 
Borgo San Sepolcro. 



STORY OF HIS SON'S DEATH, 281 

portrait of his dead son, to the end that he might 
still be able, through the work of his own hand, to 
contemplate that which nature had given him, but 
which an adverse fortune had taken away.' So 
passionate and ardent, so convinced of the indissol- 
uble bond between the soul he loved in life and its 
dead tenement of clay, and withal so iron-nerved 
and stout of will, it behooved that man to be who 
undertook in the plenitude of his power, at the age 
of sixty, to paint upon the walls of the chapel of S. 
Brizio at Orvieto the images of Doomsday, Resur- 
rection, Heaven, and Hell.^ 

* This story has been used for verse in a way to heighten its ro- 
mantic coloring. Such as the lines are, I subjoin them for the sake 
of their attempt to emphasize and illustrate Renaissance feeling : 

'Vasari tells that Luca Signorelli, 

The morning star of Michael Angelo, 

Had but one son, a youth of seventeen summers, 

Who died. That day the master at his easel 

Wielded the liberal brush wherewith he painted 

At Orvieto, on the Duomo's walls, 

Stem forms of Death and Heaven and Hell and Judgment. 

Then came they to him, cried : ' Thy son is dead, 

Slain in a duel : but the bloom of life 

Yet lingers round red lips and downy cheek.* 

Luca spoke not, but listened. Next they bore 

His dead son to the silent painting-room, 

And left on tiptoe son and sire alone. 

Still Luca spoke and groaned not ; but he raised 

The wonderful dead youth, and smoothed his hair, 

Washed his red wounds, and laid him on a bed, 

Naked and beautiful, where rosy curtains 

Shed a soft glimmer of uncertain splendor 

Life-like upon the marble liiTibs below. 

Then Luca seized his palette : hour by hour 



282 RENAISSANCE IN ITAL V. 

It is a gloomy chapel in the Gothic cathedral of 
that forlorn Papal city — gloomy by reason of bad 
lighting, but more so because of the terrible shapes 
with which Signorelli has filled it.^ In no other 
work of the Italian Renaissance, except in the Sis- 
tine Chapel, has so much thought, engaged upon the 
most momentous subjects, been expressed with 
greater force by means more simple and with effect 
more overwhelming. Architecture, landscape, and 
decorative accessories of every kind, the usual pad- 
ding of quattrocento pictures, have been discarded 
from the main compositions. The painter has relied 
solely upon his power of imagining and delineating 
the human form in every attitude, and under the 
most various conditions. Darting like hawks or 
swallows through the air, huddling together to shun 
the outpoured vials of the wrath of God, writhing 
with demons on the floor of Hell, struggling into 
new life from the clinging clay, standing beneath the 
footstool of the Judge, floating with lute and viol on 
the winds of Paradise, kneehng in prayer, or clasp- 
ing 'inseparable hands with joy and bliss in over- 
measure forever ' — these multitudes of living beings, 

Silence was in the room ; none durst approach : 
Mom wore to noon, and noon to eve, when shyly 
A little maid peeped in and saw the painter 
Painting his dead son with unerring hand-stroke, 
Firm and dry-eyed before the lordly canvas.' 

* See the article on Orvieto in my 'Sketches in Italy and Greece.' 



FRESCOES AT OR VIE TO. 283 

angelic, diabolic, bestial, human, crowd the huge 
spaces of the chapel walls. What makes the im- 
pression of controlling doom the more appalling is 
that we comprehend the drama in its several scenes, 
while the chief actor, the divine Judge, at whose 
bidding the cherubs sound their clarions, and the 
dead arise, and weal and woe are portioned to the 
saved and damned, is Himself unrepresented.^ We 
breathe in the presence of embodied consciences, 
submitting, like our own, to an unseen inevitable will. 
It would be doing Signorelli injustice at Orvieto 
to study only these great panels. The details with 
which he has filled all the vacant spaces above the 
chapel stalls and round the doorway throw new 
light upon his power. The ostensible motive for 
this elaborate ornamentation is contained in the por- 
traits of six poets, who are probably Homer, Virgil, 
Lucan, Horace, Ovid, and Dante, il sesto tra cotanto 
senno} But the portraits themselves, though vigo- 

^ The earlier frescoes of Fra Angelico, on the roof, depict Christ 
as Judge. But there is nothing in common with these works and Sig- 
norelli's. 

^ This is the conjecture of Signor Luzi (' II Duomo di Orvieto,' p. 
168). He bases it upon the Dantesque subjects illustrated, and quotes 
from the * Inferno : ' 

' Omero poeta sovrano ; 
L'altro e Orazio satiro che viene, 
Ovidio e il terzo, e I'ultimo Lucano.' 
Nothing is more marked or more deeply interesting than the influence 
exercised by Dante over Signorelli, an influence he shared with Giotto, 
Orcagna, Botticelli, Michael Angelo, the greatest imaginative painters 
of Central Italy. 



284 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

rously conceived and remarkable for bold fore- 
shortening, are the least part of the whole design. 
Its originality consists in the arabesques, medallions, 
and chiaroscuro bass-reliefs, where the human form, 
treated as absolutely plastic, supplies the sole deco- 
rative element. The pilasters by the doorway, for 
example, are composed, after the usual type of 
Italian grotteschi, in imitation of antique candelabra, 
with numerous stages for the exhibition of the artist's 
fancies. Unlike the work of Raphael in the Loggie, 
these pilasters of Signorelli show no birds or beasts, 
no flowers or foliage, fruits or fauns, no masks or 
sphinxes. They are crowded with naked men — 
drinking, dancing, leaning forward, twisting them- 
selves into strange attitudes, and adapting their 
bodies to the several degrees of the framework. 
The same may be said of the arabesques around the 
portraits of the poets, where men, women, and 
children, some complete, some ending in foliage or 
in fish-tails, are lavished with a wild and terrible 
profusion. Hippogriffs and centaurs, sirens and 
dolphins, are here used as adjuncts to humanity. 
Amid this fantastic labyrinth of twisted forms we 
find medallions painted in chiaroscuro with subjects 
taken chiefly from Ovidian and Dantesque mythol- 
ogy. Here every attitude of men in combat and in 
motion has been studied from the nude, and multi- 
tudes of figures draped and undraped are com- 



THE ARABESQUES. 285 

pressed into the briefest compass. All but the 
human form is sternly eliminated; and the body 
itself is treated with a mastery and a boldness that 
prove Signorelli to have held its varied capabilities 
firmly in his brain. He could not have worked out 
all those postures from the living model. He played 
freely with his immense stores of knowledge ; but 
his play was the pastime of a Prometheus. Each 
pose, however hazardous, carries conviction with it 
of sincerity and truth ; the life and liberty of nature 
reign throughout. From the whole maze of inter- 
laced and wrestling figures the terrible nature of the 
artist's genius shines forth. They are almost all 
strong men in the prime or past the prime of life, 
chosen for their salient display of vital structure. 
Signorelli was the first and, with the exception of 
Michael Angelo, the last painter thus to use the 
body, without sentiment, without voluptuousness, 
without any second intention whatsoever, as the 
supreme decorative principle. In his absolute sin- 
cerity he made, as it were, a parade of hard and 
rugged types, scorning to introduce an element of 
beauty, whether sensuous or ideal, that should dis- 
tract him from the study of the body in and for 
itself This distinguishes him in the arabesques at 
Orvieto alike from Mantegna and Michael Angelo, 
from Correggio and Raphael, from Titian and Paolo 
Veronese. 



286 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

This point is so important for its bearing on 
Renaissance art that I may be permitted to dilate at 
greater length on Signorelli's choice of types and 
treatment of form in general. Having a special 
predilection for the human body, he by no means 
confined himself to monotony in its presentation. 
On the contrary, we can trace many distinct grades 
of corporeal expression. First comes the abstract 
nude, illustrated by the Resurrection and the ara- 
besques at Orvieto.^ Contemporary life, with all its 
pomp of costume and insolence of ruffling youth, is 
depicted in the Fulminati at Orvieto and in the 
Soldiers of Totila at Monte Oliveto.^ These tran- 
scripts from the courts of princes and camps of 
condottieri are invaluable as portraits of the lawless 
young men who filled Italy with the noise of their 
feuds and the violence of their adventures. They 
illustrate Matarazzo's Perugian chronicle better than 
any other Renaissance pictures ; for in frescoes like 
those of Pinturicchio at Siena the same qualities are 
softened to suit the painter's predetermined harmony, 
whereas Signorelli rejoices in their pure untem- 
pered character.^ These, then, form a second stage. 

^ The background to the circular 'Madonna' in the Uffizzi, the 
' Flag^ellation of Christ ' in the Academy at Florence and in the Brera 
at Milan, and the ' Adam ' at Cortona belong to this grade. 

"^ We may add the pages in a predella representing the * Adoration 
of the Magi ' in the Uffizzi. 

^ Vasari mentions the portraits of Nicolo, Paolo, and Vitellozzc 
Vitelli, Gian Paolo, and Orazio Baglioni, among others, in the frescoes 
at Orvieto. 



FOUR TYPES OF FORM. 287 

Third in degree we find the type of highly-ideahzed 
adolescence reserved by Signorelli for his angels. 
All his science and his sympathy with real life are 
here subordinated to poetic feeling. It is a mistake 
to say that these angels are the young men of Um- 
bria whom he loved to paint in their striped jackets, 
with the addition of wings to their shoulders. The 
radiant beings who tune their citterns on the clouds 
of Paradise, or scatter roses for elect souls, could not 
live and breathe in the fiery atmosphere of sensuous 
passions to which the Baglioni were habituated. A 
grave and solemn sense of beauty animates these 
fair male beings, clothed in voluminous drapery, 
with youthful faces and still earnest eyes. Their 
melody, like that of Milton, is severe. Nor are 
Signorelli's angelic beings of one uniform type like 
the angels of Fra Angelico. The athletic cherubs 
of the Resurrection, breathing their whole strength 
into the trumpets that awake the dead ; the mailed 
and winged warriors, keeping guard above the pit 
oi Hell, that none may break their prison-bars among 
the damned ; the lute-players of Paradise, with their 
almost feminine sobriety of movement; the flame- 
breathing seraphs of the day of doom ; the Gabriel 
of Volterra, in whom strength is translated into 
swiftness — these are the heralds, sentinels, musicians, 
executioners, and messengers of the celestial court ; 
and each class is distinguished by appropriate physical 



288 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

characteristics. At the other end of the scale, form- 
ing a fourth grade, we may mention the depraved 
types of humanity chosen for his demons — those 
greenish, reddish, ocherish fiends of the Inferno, 
whom Signorelli created by exaggerating the more 
grotesque qualities of the nude developed in his 
arabesques. We thus obtain four several degrees 
of form : the demoniac, the abstract nude, the ado- 
lescent beauty of young men copied from choice 
models, and the angelic. 

Except in his angels, Signorelli was compara- 
tively indifferent to what is commonly considered 
beauty. He was not careful to select his models, or 
to idealize their type. The naked human body, 
apart from facial distinction or refinement of form, 
contented him. Violent contrasts of light and 
shadow, accentuating the anatomical structure with 
rough and angular decision, give the effect of illus- 
trative diagrams to his studies. Harmony of pro- 
portion and the magic of expression are sacrificed to 
energy emergent in a powerful physique. Redundant 
life, in sinewy limbs, in the proud carriage of the 
head upon the neck, in the sway of the trunk back- 
ward from the reins, the firmly-planted calves and 
brawny thighs, the thick hair, broad shoulders, spare 
flanks, and massive gluteal muscles of a man of 
twenty-two or upward, whose growth has been 
confined to the development of animal force, was 



THE MEDALLIONS AT ORVIETO, 289 

what delighted him. Yet there is no coarseness or 
animalism properly so called in his style. He was 
attracted by the marvelous mechanism of the hu- 
man frame — its goodliness regarded as the most 
highly organized of animate existences. 

Owing, perhaps, to this exclusive predilection 
for organic life, Signorelli was not great as a color- 
ist. His patches of blues and reds in the frescoes of 
Monte Oliveto are oppressively distinct ; his use of 
dull brown for the shading of flesh imparts a dis- 
agreeable heaviness to his best modeled forms ; nor 
did he often attain in his oil-pictures to that grave 
harmony we admire in his Last Supper at Cortona. 
The world of light and color was to him a com- 
paratively untraveied land. It remained for other 
artists to raise these elements of pictorial expres- 
sion to the height reached by Signorelli in his treat- 
ment of the nude. 

Before quitting the frescoes at Orvieto, some 
attention should be paid to the medalHons spoken of 
above, in special relation to the classicism of the 
earlier Renaissance. Scenes from Dante's Ptirgatorio 
and subjects from the Metamorphoses of Ovid are 
treated here in the same key ; but the latter, since 
they engaged Signorelli's fancy upon Greek mythol- 
ogy, are the more important for our purpose. Two 
from the legend of Orpheus and two from that of 
Proserpine might be chosen as typical of the whole 



290 RENAISSANCE IN ITAL V. 

series. Mediaeval intensity, curiously at variance 
with antique feeling, is discernible throughout. The 
satellites of Hades are gaunt and sinewy devils, 
eager to do violence to Eurydice. Pluto himself 
drives his jarring car-wheels up through the lava- 
blocks and flames of Etna with a fury and a vehe- 
mence we seek in vain upon antique sarcophagi. 
Ceres, wandering through Sicily in search of her 
lost daughter, is a gaunt witch with disheveled hair, 
raising frantic hands to tear her cheeks ; while the 
snakes that draw her chariot are no grave symbols 
of the germinating corn, but greedy serpents ready 
to spit fire against the ravishers of Proserpine. Thus 
the tranquillity and self-restraint of Greek art yield 
to a passionate and trenchant realization of the actual 
romance. The most thrilling moments in the legend 
are selected for dramatic treatment, grace and beauty 
being exchanged for vivid presentation. A whole 
cycle of human experience separates these medal- 
lions from the antique bass-rehef at Naples, where 
Hermes hands the veiled Eurydice to Orpheus, and 
all three are calm. That Signorelli, if he chose to 
do so, could represent a classic myth with more of 
classic feeling is shown by his picture of Pan Listen- 
ing to Olympus} The nymph, the vine-leaf-girdled 

* Painted for Lorenzo de' Medici. It is now in the Berlin Museum 
through the neglect of the National Gallery authorities to purchase \\ 
for England. 



SIGNORRLLrs FEELING FOR THE ANTIQUE, 291 

faun, and the two shepherds, all undraped and drawn 
with subtle feeling for the melodies of line, render 
this work one of his most successful compositions. 

It would be interesting to compare Signorelli's 
treatment of the antique with Mantegna's or Bot- 
ticelli's. The visions of the pagan world, float- 
ing before the mind of all men in the fifteenth 
century, found very diflferent interpreters in these 
three painters — Botticelli adding the quaint alloy 
of his own fancy, Signorelli imparting the semi- 
savagery of a terrible imagination, Mantegna, with 
the truest instinct and the firmest touch, confining 
himself to the processional pageantry of bass-relief. 
Yet, were this comparison to be instituted, we could 
hardly refrain from carrying It much further. Each 
great master of the Renaissance had his own relation 
to classical mythology. The mystic sympathies of 
Leda and the Swan, as imaged severally by Lionardo 
and Michael Angelo ; Correggio's romantic handling 
of the myths of Dande and lo; Titian's and Tinto- 
retto's rival pictures of Bacchus and Ariadne; Ra- 
phael's Galatea; Pollajuolo's Hercules; the Europa 
of Veronese ; the Circe of Dosso Dossi ; Palma's 
Venus; Sodoma's Marriage of Alexander — all these, 
to mention none but pictures familiar to every trav- 
eler in Italy, raise for the student of the classical 
Revival absorbing questions relative to the influences 
of pagan myths upon the modern imagination. 



292 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

Signorelli was chiefly occupied, during the course 
of his long career, upon religious pictures ; and the 
high place he occupies in the history of Renaissance 
culture is due partly to his free abandonment of 
conventional methods in treating sacred subjects. 
The Ufiizzi Gallery contains a circular Madonna 
by his hand, with a row of naked men for back- 
ground — the forerunner of Michael Angelo's famous 
Holy Family. So far had art for art's sake already 
encroached upon the ecclesiastical domain. To 
discuss Signorelli's merits as a painter of altar-pieces 
would be to extend the space allotted to him far 
beyond its proper limits. It is not as a religious 
artist that he takes his rank, but as having power- 
fully promoted the rehabilitation of the body achieved 
for art by the Renaissance. 

Unlike Mantegna, Signorelli never entered the 
service of a prince, though we have seen that he 
executed commissions for Lorenzo de' Medici and 
Pandolfo Petrucci. He bore a name which, if not 
noble, had been more than once distinguished in the 
annals of Tuscany. Residing at his native place, 
Gortona, he there enjoyed the highest reputation, 
and was frequently elected to municipal office. Con- 
cerning his domestic life very little is known, but 
what we do know is derived from an excellent 
source.^ His mother was the sister of Lazzaro, 

* I must not omit to qualify Vasari's praise of Luca Signorelli, by 
reference to a letter recently published from the ' Archivio Buonarroti, 



SIGNORELLVS PERSONAL CHARACTER, 293 

great-grandfather of Giorgio Vasari. In his biog- 
raphy of Signorelli, Vasari relates how, when he 
was himself a boy of eight, his illustrious cousin 
visited the house of the Vasari family at Arezzo ; 
and hearing from little Giorgio's grammar-master 
that he spent his time in drawing figures, Luca 
turned to the child's father and said, 'Antonio, 
since Giorgio takes after his family, you must by 
all means have him taught ; for even though he 
should pay attention to literature as well, drawing 
can not fail to be a source of utility, honor, and 
recreation to him, as it is to every man of worth.' 
Luca's kindness deeply impressed the boy, who 
afterward wrote the following description of his 
personal qualities : * He was a man of the most 
excellent habits, sincere and affectionate with his 
friends, sweet of conversation and amusing in so- 
ciety, above all things courteous to those who had 
need of his work, and easy in giving instruction 
to his pupils. He lived splendidly, and took de- 
light in dressing handsomely. This excellent dis- 

Lettere a Diversi,' p. 391. Michael Angelo there addresses the Captain 
of Cortona, and complains that in the first year of Leo's pontificate 
Luca came to him and by various representations obtained from him 
the sum of eighty Giulios, which he never repaid, although he made 
profession to have done so. Michael Angelo was ill at the time, and 
working with much difficulty on a statue of a bound captive for the 
tomb of Julius. Luca gave a specimen of his renowned courtesy 
by comforting the sculptor in these rather sanctimonious phrases : 
* Doubt not that angels will come from heaven to support your arms 
and help you.' 



294 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY, 

position caused him to be always held in highest 
veneration both in his own city and abroad/ 

To turn from Signorelli to Perugino is to plunge 
at once into a very different atmosphere.^ It is 
like quitting the rugged gorges of high mountams 
for a valley of the Southern Alps — still, pensive, 
beautiful, and colored with reflections from an 
evening sky. Perugino knew exactly how to rep- 
resent a certain mood of religious sentiment, blend- 
ing meek acquiescence with a prayerful yearning of 
the impassioned soul. His Madonnas worshiping 
the infant Jesus in a tranquil Umbrian landscape, 
his angels ministrant, his pathetic martyrs with 
upturned holy faces, his sexless S. Sebastians and 
immaculate S. Michaels, display the perfection of 
art able by color and by form to achieve within 
a narrow range what it desires. What this artist 
seems to have aimed at was to create for the soul 
amid the pomps and passions of this world a rest- 
ing-place of contemplation tenanted by saintly and 
seraphic beings. No pain comes near the folk of 
his celestial city ; no longing poisons their repose ; 
they are not weary, and the wicked trouble them 
no more. Their cheerfulness is no less perfect than 
their serenity ; like the shades of Hellas, they have 
drunk Lethean waters from the river of content, 

' Pietro, known as Perugino from the city of his adoption, was the 
son of Cristoforo Vannucci, of Citta della Pieve. He was bom in 
1446, and died at Fontignano, in 1^2?. 



PERUGINO'S PIETISTIC STYLE. 295 

and all remembrance of things sad or harsh has 
vanished from their minds. The quietude of holi- 
ness expressed in this ideal region was a legacy 
to Perugino from earlier Umbrian masters; but 
his technical supremacy in fresco-painting and in 
oils, his correct drawing within certain limits, and 
his refined sense of color enabled him to realize 
it more completely than his less accomplished pre- 
decessors. In his best work the Renaissance set 
the seal of absolute perfection upon pietistic art. 

We English are fortunate in possessing one of 
Perugino's sincerest devotional oil-pictures.^ His 
frescoes of S. Sebastian at Panicale, and of the 
Crucifixion at Florence, are tolerably well known 
through reproductions ; ^ while the Vision of S. Ber- 
nard at Munich and the Pieta in the Pitti Gallery 
are familiar to all traveled students of Italian paint- 
ing. These masterpieces belong to Perugino 's best 
period, when his inspiration was fresh and his en- 
thusiasm for artistic excellence was still unimpaired ; 
and when, as M. Rio thinks, the failure of his faith 
had not yet happened. It is only at Perugia, however, 
in the Sala del Cambio, that we are able to gauge 
the extent of his power and to estimate the value 
of his achievement beyond the pale of strictly re- 
ligious themes. 

^ The triptych in the National Gallery. 

' They have been published by the Arundel Society. 



296 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

Early in the course of his career Perugino seems 
to have become contented with a formal repetition 
of successful motives, and to have checked the 
growth of his genius by adhering closely to a pre- 
scribed cycle of effects. The praises of his patrons 
and the prosperity of his trade proved to his keen 
commercial sense that the raised ecstatic eyes, 
the upturned oval faces, the pale olive skin, the 
head inclined upon the shoulder, the thin fluttering 
hair, the ribbons and the dainty dresses of his 
holy persons found great favor in Umbrian pal- 
aces and convents. Thenceforward he painted but 
little else ; and when, in the Sala del Cambio, he 
was obliged to treat the representative heroes of 
Greek and Roman story, he adopted the same 
manner.^ Leonidas, the lion-hearted Spartan, and 
Cato, the austere Roman, who preferred liberty to 
life, bend their mild heads like flowers in Perugino's 
frescoes, and gather up their drapery in studied 
folds with celestial delicacy. Jove is a reproduction 
of the Eterno Padre, conceived as a benevolent 
old man for a conventional painting of the Trinity; 
and Ganymede is a page-boy with the sweet submis- 
sive features of Tobias. Already Perugino had 
opened a manufactory of pietistic pictures, and was 
employing many pupils on his works. Fie coined 

* These frescoes were begun in 1499. It may be mentioned that 
in this year, on the refusal of Perugino to decorate the Cappella di S. 
Brizio, the Orvietans intrusted that work to Signorelli. 



PERUGINO'S PERSONAL CHARACTER. 297 

money by fixing artificially beautiful faces upon 
artificially elegant figures, placing a row of these 
puppets in a landscape with calm sky behind them, 
and calling the composition by the name of some 
familiar scene. His inspiration was dead, his in- 
vention exhausted; his chief object seemed to be 
to make his trade thrive. 

Perugino will always remain a problem to the 
psychologist who believes in physiognomy, as well as 
to the student of the passionate times in which he 
lived. His hard unsympathetic features in the por- 
traits at Perugia and Florence do not belie, but 
rather win credence for, Vasari's tales about his sordid 
soul.* Local traditions and contemporary rumors, 
again, give color to what Vasari relates about his 
infidelity ; while the criminal records of Florence 
prove that he was not over-scrupulous to keep his 
hands from violence.^ How could such a man, we 

* Uffizzi and Sala del Cambio. 

^ * Fu Pietro persona di assai poca religione, e non se gli pote mai 
far credere rimmortalita dell' anima : anzi, con parole accomodate al 
sue cervello di porfido, ostinatissimamente ricuso ogni buona vita. 
Aveva ogni sua speranza ne' beni della fortuna, e per danari arebbe 
fatto ogni male contrattc' Vasari, vol. vi. p. 50. The local tradition 
alluded to above relates to the difficulties raised by the Church against 
the Christian burial of Perugino: but if he died ot plague, as it is 
believed (see C. and C, vol. iii. p. 244), these difficulties were prob- 
ably caused by panic rather than belief in his impiety. For Gaspare 
Cello's note on Perugino's refusal to confess upon his death-bed, saying 
that he preferred to see how an impenitent sou! would fare in the 
other world, the reader may consult Rio's ' L'Art Chretien,' vol. ii. p. 
269. The record of Perugino's arming himself in Dec. i486, together 



298 RENAISSANCE IN ITAL Y. 

ask ourselves, have endured to pass a long life in 
the fabrication of devotional pictures ? Whence did 
he derive the sentiment of masterpieces, for piety 
only equaled by those of Fra Angelico, either in his 
own nature or in the society of a city torn to pieces 
by the factions of the Baglioni ? How, again, was it 
possible for an artist who at times touched beauty 
so ideal to be contented with the stenciling by his 
pupils of conventional figures on canvases to which 
he gave his name? Taking these questions sepa- 
rately, we might reply that * there is no art to find 
the mind's construction in the face ; ' that painting in 
the sixteenth century was a trade regulated by the 
demand for particular wares; that men can live 
among ruffians without sharing their mood ; that the 
artist and the moral being are separate, and may not 
be used to interpret each other. Yet, after giving 
due weight to such answers, Perugino, being what 
he was, living at the time he did, not as a recluse, 
but as a prosperous impresario of painting, and sys- 
tematically devoting his powers to pietistic art, must 
be for us a puzzle. That the quietism of his highly- 
artificial style should have been fashionable in Peru- 
gia, while the Baglioni were tearing each other to 
pieces and the troops of the Vitelli and the Borgia 
were trampling upon Umbria, is one of the most 

with a notorious assassin, Aulista di Angelo of Perugia, in o 'der to 
waylay and beat a private enemy of his near S. Pietro Maggiore at 
Florence, is quoted by Crowe and Cavalcaselle, vol. iii. p. 183. 



AN IMPRESARIO OF PAINTING. 299 

Striking paradoxes of an age rich in dramatic con- 
tradictions. 

It is much to be regretted, with a view to solving 
the question of Perugino^s personahty in relation to 
his art, that his character does not emerge with any 
salience from the meager notices we have received 
concerning him, and that we know but httle of his 
private life. Vasari tells us that he married a very 
beautiful girl, and that one of his chief pleasures was 
to see this wife handsomely dressed at home and 
abroad. He often decked her out in clothes and 
jewels with his own hand. For the rest, we find in 
Perugino, far more than in either Mantegna or Sig- 
norelli, an instance of the simple Italian craftsman, 
employing numerous assistants, undertaking contract 
work on a large scale, and striking keen bargains 
with his employers. Both at Florence and at Pe- 
rugia he opened a bottega; and by the exercise of his 
trade as a master-painter he realized enough money 
to buy substantial estates in those cities, as well as 
in his birthplace.* In all the greatest art-works of 
the age he took his part. Thus we find him paint- 
ing in the Sistine Chapel between 1484 and i486, 
treating with the commune of Orvieto for the com- 
pletion of the chapel of S. Brizio in 1489, joining in 
the debate upon the fagade of S. Maria del Fiore in 

^ * Guadagno molte ricchezze ; e in Fiorenza muro e compr6 case ; 
ed in Perugia ed a Castello della Pieve acquistd molti beni stabili.* 
Vas^ii voL VL p. 50. — - -- r 



300 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY, 

1491 , giving his opinion upon the erection of Michael 
Angelo's David 2it Florence in 1504, and competing 
with Signorelli, Pinturicchio, and Bazzi for the 
decoration of the Stanze of the Vatican in 1508. 
The rising of brighter stars above the horizon during 
his Hfetime somewhat dimmed his fame, and caused 
him much disquietude; yet neither Raphael nor 
Michael Angelo interfered with the demand for 
his pictures, which continued to be lively till the 
very year of his death. That he was jealous of 
these younger rivals appears from the fact that he 
brought an action against Michael Angelo for having 
called his style stupid and antiquated. In the cele- 
brated phrase cast at him by the blunt and scornful 
master of a new art-mystery ^ we discern the abrupt 
line of division between time-honored tradition and 
the mantera moderna of the full Renaissance. The 
old Titans had to yield their place before the new 
Olympian deities of Italian painting. There is some- 
thing pathetic in the retirement of the gray-haired 
Perugino from Rome, to make way for the victorious 
Phoebean beauty of the boy Raphael. 

The influence of Perugino upon Italian art was 
powerful though transitory. He formed a band of 
able pupils, among whom was the great Raphael ; 
and though Raphael speedily abandoned his mas- 
ter's narrow footpath through the fields of painting, 
* 'Goffo neir arte.' SeeVasari. vol. vi. p. 46. See too above, p. 268^ 



BERNARDO PINTURICCHIO. 301 

he owed to Perugino the invaluble benefit of train- 
ing in solid technical methods and traditions of pure 
taste. From none of his elder contemporaries, with 
the exception of Fra Bartolommeo, could the young 
Raphael have learned so much that was congenial 
to his early instincts. What, for example, might 
have befallen him if he had worked with Signorelli 
it is difficult to imagine ; for while nothing is more 
obvious on the one hand than Raphael's originality, 
his strong assimilative bias is scarcely less remarka- 
ble. The time has not yet come to speak of Ra- 
phael ; nor will space suffice for detailed observations 
on his fellow-students in the workshop at Perugia. 
The place occupied by Perugino in the evolution of 
Italian painting is peculiar. In the middle of a posi- 
tive and worldly age, declining fast to frigid skep- 
ticism and political corruption, he set the final touch 
of technical art upon the devotion transmitted from 
earlier and more enthusiastic centuries. The flower 
of Umbrian piety blossomed in the masterpieces of 
his youth, and faded into dryness in the affectations 
of his manhood. Nothing was left on the same line 
for his successors. 

Among these, Bernardo Pinturicchio can here 
alone be mentioned. A thorough naturahst, though 
saturated with the mannerism of the Umbrian 
school, Pinturicchio was not distracted e.ther by 
scientific or ideal aims from the clear and fluent 



302 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY, 

presentation of contemporary manners and cos- 
tumes. He is a kind of Umbrian Gozzoli, who 
brings us here and there in close relation to the men 
of his own time, and has in consequence a special 
value for the student of Renaissance life. His wall- 
paintings in the library of the cathedral of Siena are 
so well preserved that we need not seek elsewhere 
for better specimens of the decorative art most 
highly prized in the first years of the sixteenth cen- 
tury.^ These frescoes have a richness of effect and 
a vivacity of natural action which, in spite of their 
superficiality, render them highly charming. The 
life of iEneas Sylvius Piccolomini, Pius H., is here 
treated like a legend. There is no attempt at repre- 
senting the dress of half a century anterior to the 
painter's date, or at rendering accurate historic por- 
traiture. Both Pope and Emperor are romantically 
conceived, and each portion of the tale is told as 
though it were a fit in some popular ballad. So 
much remains of Perugian affectation as gives a 
kind of child-like grace to the studied attitudes and 
many-colored groups of elegant young men. 

We must always be careful to distinguish the 
importance of an artist considered as the exponent 
of his age from that which he may claim by virtue 
of some special skill or some peculiar quality of feel- 

* I select these for comment rather than the frescoes at Spello, 
beautiful as these are, because they have more interest in relation to 
the style of the Renaissance. 



FRANCIA, 303 

ing. The art of Perugino, for example, throws but 
little light upon the Renaissance taken as a whole. 
Intrinsically valuable because of its technical perfec- 
tion and its purity of sentiment, it was already in 
the painter's lifetime superseded by a larger and a 
grander manner. The progressive forces of the 
modern style found their channels outside him. 
This again is true of Francesco Raibolini, surnamed 
Francia from his master in the goldsmith's craft. 
Francia is known to Englishmen as one of the most 
sincerely pious of Christian painters by his incom- 
parable picture of the Dead Christ in our National 
Gallery. The spirituality that renders Fra Angelico 
unintelligible to minds less ecstatically tempered than 
his own is not found in such excess in Francia, nor 
does his work suffer from the insipidity of Perugino's 
affectation. Deep religious feeling is combined with 
physical beauty of the purest type in a masterpiece 
of tranquil grace. A greater degree of naivete and 
naturalness compensates for the inferiority of Fran- 
cia's to Perugino's supremely perfect handling. This 
is true of Francia's numerous pictures at Bologna ; 
where indeed, in order to be rightly known, he 
should be studied by all lovers of the quattrocento 
style in its most delightful moments.^ For mastery 
over oil-painting and for charm of color Francia 

^ The * Assumption ' in S. Frediano at Lucca should also be men- 
tioned as one of Francia's masterpieces. 



304 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

challenges comparison with what is best in Perugino, 
though he did not quite attain the same technical 
excellence. 

One more painter must delay us yet awhile 
within the limits of the fifteenth century. Barto- 
lommeo di Paolo del Fattorino, better known as 
Baccio della Porta or Fra Bartolommeo, forms at 
Florence the connecting link between the artists of 
the earlier Renaissance and the golden age.^ By 
chronological reckoning he is nearly a quarter of a 
century later than Lionardo da Vinci, and is the 
exact contemporary of Michael Angelo. As an 
artist, he has thoroughly outgrown the quattrocento 
style, and falls short only by a little of the greatest. 
In assigning him a place among the predecessors 
and precursors of the full Renaissance, I am there- 
fore influenced rather by the range of subjects he 
selected, and by the character of his genius, than by 
calculations of time or estimate of ability. 

Fra Bartolommeo was sent, when nine years 
old, into the workshop of Cosimo Rosselli, where he 
began his artist's life by color-grinding, sweeping 
out the shop, and errand-running. It was in Cosimo's 
bottega that he made acquaintance with Mariotto 
Albertinelli, who became his intimate friend and 
fellow-worker. In spite of marked differences of 

^ His father was a muleteer of Suffignano, who settled at Florence, 
in a house and garden near the gate of S. Piero Gattolino. He was 
born in 1475, and he died in 1517. 



FRA BARTOLOMMEO AND ALBERTINELLI. 30S 

character, disagreements upon the fundamental mat- 
ters of poHtics and reHgion, and not unfrequent quar- 
rels, these men continued to be comrades through 
the better part of their joint lives. Baccio was 
gentle, timid, yielding, and industrious. Mariotto 
was willful, obstinate, inconsequent, and flighty. 
Baccio fell under the influence of Savonarola, pro- 
fessed himself di piagnone, and took the cowl of the 
Dominicans.^ Mariotto was a partisan of the M edici, 
an uproarious /^//^i"^^, and a loose liver, who event- 
ually deserted the art of painting for the calling oi 
an innkeeper. Yet so sweet was the temper of the 
Frate, and so firm was the bond of friendship estab- 
lished in boyhood between this ill-assorted couple, 
that they did not part company until 15 12, three 
years before Mariotto's death and five before that of 
Bartolommeo. During their long association the 
task of designing fell upon the Frate, while Alberti- 
nelli took his orders and helped to work out his 
conceptions. Both were excellent craftsmen and 
consummate colorists, as is proved by the pictures 
executed by each unassisted. Albertinelli's Saluta- 
tion in the Uflfizzi yields no point of grace and vigor 
to any of his more distinguished coadjutor's paintings. 
The great contributions made by Fra Barto- 
lommeo to the art of Italy were in the double region 

' In S. Domenico at Prato in 1 500. He afterward resided in S. 
Marco at Florence. 



3o6 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY, 

of composition and coloring. In his justly-cele- 
brated fresco of S. Maria Nuova at Florence — a 
Last Judg7nent with a Christ enthroned amid 
a choir of Saints — he exhibited for the first time a 
thoroughly-scientific scheme of grouping based on 
geometrical principles. Each part is perfectly bal- 
anced in itself, and yet is necessary to the structure 
of the whole. The complex framework may be 
subdivided into numerous sections no less harmo- 
niously ordered than is the total scheme to which 
they are subordinated. Simple figures — the pyramid 
and the triangle, upright, inverted, and interwoven 
like the rhymes in a sonnet — form the basis of the 
composition. This system was adhered to by the 
Frate in all his subsequent works. To what extent 
it influenced the style of Raphael will be afterward 
discussed. As a colorist, Fra Bartolommeo was 
equal to the best of his contemporaries, and superior 
to any of his rivals in the school of Florence. Few 
painters of any age have combined harmony of tone 
so perfectly with brilliance and richness. It is a 
real joy to contemplate the pure and splendid folds 
of the white drapery he loved to place in the fore- 
ground of his altar-pieces. Solidity and sincerity 
distinguish his work in every detail, while his feehng 
is remarkable for elevation and sobriety. All that 
he lacks is the boldness of imagination, the depth of 
passion, and the power of thought, that are indispen- 
sable to genius of the highest order. Gifted with a 



THE PAINTER OF ADORATION. 307 

sympathetic and a pliant rather than a creative and 
self-sustained nature, he was sensitive to every in- 
fluence. Therefore we find him learning much in 
his youth from LionardOj deriving a fresh impulse 
from Raphael, and endeavoring in his later life, 
after a visit to Rome in 1514, to ' heighten his style,' 
as the phrase went, by emulating Michael Angelo. 
The attempt to tread the path of Buonarroti was a 
failure. What Fra Bartolommeo sought to gain in 
majesty he lost in charm. His was essentially a 
pure and gracious manner, upon which subhmity 
could not be grafted. The gentle soul, who dropped 
his weapon when the convent of S. Marco was 
besieged by the Compagnacci,^ and who vowed, if 
Heaven preserved him in the tumult, to become a 
monk, had none of Michael Angelo's terribilita. 
Without possessing some share of that spirit, it was 
vain to aggrandize the forms and mass the raiment 
of his prophets in imitation of the Sistine. 

Nature made Fra Bartolommeo the painter of 
adoration.^ His masterpiece at Lucca — the Madonna 
della Misericordia — is a poem of glad worship, a 
hymn of prayerful praise. Our Lady stands elate, 
between earth and heaven, appealing to her Son for 
mercy. At her footstool are her suppliants, the 

* May 23, 1498. 

' In addition to the pictures mentioned above, I may call attention 
to the adoring figure of S. Catherine of Siena, in three large paint- 
ings — now severally in the Pitti, at Lucca, and in the Louvre. 



3o8 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY, 

men and women and little children of the city she 
has saved. The peril is past. Salvation has been 
won ; and the song of thanksgiving ascends from all 
those massed and mingled forms in unison. Not 
less truly is the great unfinished picture of Madonna 
surrounded by the Patron Saints of Florence a poem 
of adoration.* This painting was ordered by the 
Gonfalonier Piero Soderini, the man who dedicated 
Florence to Christ as King. He intended it to take 
its place in the hall of the Consiglio Grande, where 
Michael Angelo and Lionardo gained their earliest 
laurels. Before it could be finished, the Republic 
perished.^ * That/ says Rio, * is the reason why he 
left but an imperfect work — for those at least who 
are only struck by what is wanting in it. Others 
will at first regard it with the interest attaching to 
unfinished poems, interrupted by the jailer's call or 
by the stern voice of the executioner. Then they 
will study it in all its details, in order to appreciate 
its beauties ; and that appreciation will be the more 
perfect in proportion as a man is the more fully pene- 
trated with its dominant idea, and with the attendant 
circumstances that bring this home to him. It is not 
against an abstract enemy that the intercession of 
the celestial powers is here invoked : it is not by a 
caprice of the painter or his patron that, in the group 

* In the Uffizzi. As a composition, it is the Frate's masterpiece. 
' See 'Age of the Despots,' p. 427, for this consequence of the 
ssick of Prato. 



INFLUENCE OF SAVONAROLA. 309 

of central figures, S. Anne attracts attention before 
the Holy Virgin, not only by reason of her pre- 
eminence, but also through the intensity of her 
heavenward prayer, and again through her beauty, 
which far surpasses that of nearly all Madonnas 
painted by Fra Bartolommeo.' ^ But artist and 
patron had indeed good reason, in this crisis of the 
Commonwealth, to select as the most eminent advo- 
cate for Florence at the bar of Heaven that saint 
on whose day, July 26, 1343, had been celebrated 
the emancipation of the city from its servitude to 
Walter of Brienne. 

The great event of Fra Bartolommeo's life was 
the impression produced on him by Savonarola.* 
Having listened to the Dominican's terrific denun- 
ciations of worldliness and immorality, he carried 
his life-studies to the pyre of vanities, resolved to 
assume the cowl, and renounced his art. Between 
1499, when he was engaged in painting the Last 
Judgment of S. Maria Nuova, and 1506, he is 
supposed never to have touched the pencil. When 
he resumed it Savonarola had been burned for 
heresy, and Fra Bartolommeo was a brother in his 
convent of S. Marco. Savonarola has sometimes 

* *L'Art Chretien/ vol. ii. p. 515. 

• Two of our best portraits of Savonarola, the earlier inscribed 
•Hieronymi Ferrariensis a Deo Missi Prophetae Effigies,' the later 
treated to represent S. Peter Martyr, are from the hand of Fra Bar- 
tolommeo. See Crowe and Cavalcaselle, vol. iii. p. 433. 



3IO RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

been described as an iconoclast, obstinately hostile 
to the fine arts. This is by no means a true 
account of the crusade he carried on against the 
pagan sensuality of his contemporaries. He de- 
sired that art should remain the submissive hand- 
maid of the Church and the willing servant of pure 
morality. While he denounced the heathenism of the 
style in vogue at Florence, and forbade the study 
of the nude, he strove to encourage religious paint- 
ing, and established a school for its exercise in the 
cloister of S. Marco. It was in this monastic 
bottega that Fra Bartolommeo, in concert with his 
friend Albertinelli, worked for the benefit of the con- 
vent after the year 1 506. The reforms Savonarola 
attempted in the fine arts as in manners, by running 
counter to the tendencies of the Renaissance at a 
moment when society was too corrupt to be re- 
generated, and the passion for antiquity was too 
powerful to be restrained, proved of necessity in- 
effective. It may further be said that the limita- 
tions he imposed would have been fatal to the free 
development of art if they had been observed. 

Several painters, besides Fra Baccio, submitted 
to Savonarola's influence. Among these the most 
distinguished were the pure and gentle Lorenzo di 
Credi and Sandro Botticelli, who, after the great 
preacher's death, is said to have abandoned paint 
ing. Neither Lorenzo di Credi nor Fra Baccic 



THE FOUR ARCHANGELS OF PAINTING, 311 

possessed a portion of the prophet's fiery spirit. 
Had that but found expression in their cloistral 
pictures, one of the most peculiar and characteristic 
flowers of art the world has ever known would 
then have bloomed in Florence. The mantle cf 
Savonarola, however, if it fell upon any painter, 
fell on Michael Angelo, and we must seek an echo of 
the friar's thunders in the Sistine Chapel. Fra Barto- 
lommeo was too tender and too timid. The sublimi- 
ties of tragic passion lay beyond his scope. Though 
I have ventured to call him the painter of adoration, 
he did not feel even this movement of the soul 
with the intensity of Fra Angelico. In the person 
of S. Dominic kneeling beneath the cross Fra An- 
gelico painted worship as an ecstasy, wherein the 
soul goes forth with love and pain and yearning 
beyond any power of words or tears or music to 
express what it would utter. To these heights of 
the ascetic ideal Fra Bartolommeo never soared. 
His sobriety bordered upon the prosaic. -| 

We have now reached the great age of the ' 
Italian Renaissance, the age in which, not counting 
for the moment Venice, four archangelic natures 
gathered up all that had been hitherto achieved in 
art since the days of Pisano and Giotto, adding 
such celestial illumination from the sunlight of their 
inborn genius that in them the world forever sees 
what art can do. Lionardo da Vinci was born in 



312 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

Valdarno in 1452, and died in France in 15 19. 
Michael Angelo Buonarroti was born at Caprese,in 
the Casentino, in 1475, and died at Rome in 1564, 
having outlived the lives of his great peers by nearly 
half a century. Raphael Santi was born at Urbino 
in 1483, and died in Rome in 1520. Antonio Alle- 
gri was born at Correggio in 1494, and died there in 
1534. To these four men, each in his own degree 
and according to his own peculiar quality of mind, 
the fullness of the Renaissance, in its power and free- 
dom, was revealed. They entered the inner shrine 
where dwelt the spirit of their age, and bore to the 
world without the message each of them had heard. 
In their work posterity still may read the mean- 
ing of that epoch, differently rendered according to 
the difference of gifts in each consummate artist, 
but comprehended in its unity by study of the four 
together. Lionardo is the wizard or diviner ; to 
him the Renaissance offers her mystery and lends 
her magic. Raphael is the Phoebean singer; to 
him the Renaissance reveals her joy and dowers 
him with her gift of melody. Correggio is the 
Ariel or Faun, the lover and light-giver; he has 
surprised laughter upon the face of the universe, and 
he paints this laughter in ever-varying movement. 
Michael Angelo is the prophet and Sibylline seer ; 
to him the Renaissance discloses the travail of her 
spirit ; him she endues with power ; he wrests her 



LIONARDO DA VINCI, 313 

secret, voyaging, like an ideal Columbus, the vast 
abyss of thought alone. In order that this revela- 
tion of the Renaissance in painting should be com- 
plete, it is necessary to add a fifth power to these 
four — that of the Venetian masters, who are the 
poets of carnal beauty, the rhetoricians of mundane 
pomp, the impassioned interpreters of all things 
great and splendid in the pageant of the outer 
world. As Venice herself, by type of constitution 
and historical development, remained sequestered 
from the rest of Italy, so her painters demand sepa- 
rate treatment.^ It is enough, therefore, for the pres- 
ent to remember that without the note they utter 
the chord of the Renaissance lacks its harmony. 

Lionardo, the natural son of Messer Pietro, 
notary of Florence and landed proprietor at Vinci, 
was so beautiful of person that no one, says Vasari, 
has sufficiently extolled his charm; so strong of 
limb that he could bend an iron ring or horseshoe 
between his fingers ; so eloquent of speech that 
those who listened to his words were fain to answer 
' Yes ' or ' No ' as he thought fit. This child of 
grace and persuasion was a wonderful musician. 
The Duke of Milan sent for him to play upon his 
lute and improvize Italian canzoni. The lute he 
carried was of silver, fashioned like a horse's head, 
and tuned according to acoustic laws discovered 

' See below, chapter vii. 



314 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY, 

by himself. Of the songs he sang to its accom- 
paniment none have been preserved. Only one 
sonnet remains to show of what sort was the poetry 
of Lionardo, prized so highly by the men of his 
own generation. This, too, is less remarkable for 
poetic beauty than for sober philosophy expressed 
with singular brevity of phrase.^ 

This story of Da Vinci's lute might be chosen as 
a parable of his achievement. Art and science were 
never separated in his work ; and both were not 
unfrequently subservient to some fanciful caprice, 
some bizarre freak of originality. Curiosity and love 
of the uncommon ruled his nature. By intuition and 
by persistent interrogation of nature he penetrated 
many secrets of science ; but he was contented with 
the acquisition of knowledge. Once found, he had 
but little care to distribute the results of his inves- 

^ This sonnet I have translated into English with such closeness to 
the original words as I found possible : 

He who can do not what he wills, should try 
To will what he can do ; for since 'tis vain 
To will what can't be compassed, to abstain 
From idle wishing is philosophy. 

Lo, all our happiness and grief imply 
Knowledge or not of will's ability : 
They therefore can, who will what ought to be, 
Nor wrest true reason from her seat awry. 

Nor what a man can, should he always will : 
Oft seemeth sweet what after is not so ; 
And what I wished, when had, hath cost a tear. 

Then, reader of these lines, if thou wouldst still 
Be helpful to thyself, to others dear. 
Will to can alway what thou ought to do. 



HIS SCIENTIFIC CURIOSITY. 315 

tigations ; at most he sought to use them for pur- 
poses of practical utility.^ Even in childhood he is 
said to have perplexed his teachers by propounding 
arithmetical problems. In his maturity he carried 
anatomy further than Delia Torre; he invented 
machinery for water-mills and aqueducts ; he devised 
engines of war, discovered the secret of conical rifle- 
bullets, adapted paddle-wheels to boats, projected 
new systems of siege artillery, investigated the prin- 
ciples of optics, designed buildings, made plans for 
piercing mountains, raising churches, connecting 
rivers, draining marshes, clearing harbors.^ There 
was no branch of study whereby nature through the 
effort of the inquisitive intellect might be subordi- 
nated to the use of man of which he was not master, 

* See the letter addressed by Lionardo to Lodovico Sforza enume- 
rating his claims as a mechanician, military and civil engineer, archi- 
tect, etc. It need scarcely be mentioned that he served Cesare Bor- 
gia and the Florentine Republic as an engineer, and that much of his 
time at Milan was spent in hydraulic works upon the Adda. It should 
be added here tiiat Lionardo committed the results of his discoveries 
to writing ; but he published very little, and that by no means the 
most precious portion of his thoughts. He founded at Milan an 
Academy of Arts and Sciences, if this name may be given to a re- 
union of artists, scholars, and men of the world, to whom it is probable 
that he communicated his researches in anatomy. The * Treatise on 
Painting' which bears his name is a compilation from notes and MSB. 
first printed in 1651. 

^ The folio volume of sketches in the Ambrosian Library at Milan 
contains designs for all these works. The collection in the Royal 
Library at Windsor is no less rich. Among Lionardo's scientific 
drawings in the latter place may be mentioned a series of maps illus- 
trating the river system of Central Italy, with plans for improved 
drainage. 



3i6 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

Nor, richly gifted as was Lionardo, did he trust his 
natural facility. His patience was no less marvelous 
than the quickness of his insight. He lived to illus- 
trate the definition of genius as the capacity for 
taking infinite pains. 

While he was a boy, says Vasari, Lionardo 
modeled in terra-cotta certain heads of women 
smiling. This was in the workshop of Verocchio, 
who had already fixed a smile on David's face in 
bronze. When an old man, he left Mona Lisa on 
the easel not quite finished, the portrait of a subtle, 
shadowy, uncertain smile. This smile, this enigmatic 
revelation of a movement in the soul, this seductive 
ripple on the surface of the human personality, was 
to Lionardo a symbol of the secret of the world, an 
image of the universal mystery. It haunted him all 
through his life, and innumerable were the attempts 
he made to render by external form the magic of 
this fugitive and evanescent charm. 

Through long days he would follow up and 
down the streets of Florence or of Milan beautiful 
unknown faces, learning them by heart, interpreting 
their changes of expression, reading the thoughts 
through the features. These he afterward com- 
mitted to paper. We possess many such sketches — 
a series of ideal portraits, containing each an un- 
solved riddle that the master read ; a procession of 
shadows, cast by reality, that, entering the camera 



BEAUTY AND UGLINESS. 317 

lucida of the artist's brain, gained new and spiritual 
quality.^ In some of them his fancy seems to be 
imprisoned in the labyrinths of hair; in others the 
eyes deep with feehng or hard with gem-like bril- 
liancy have caught it, or the Hps that tell and hide 
so much, or the nostrils quivering with moment- 
ary emotion. Beauty, inexpressive of inner mean- 
ing, must, we conceive, have had but slight attraction 
for him. We do not find that he drew ' a fair naked 
body ' for the sake of its carnal charm ; his hasty 
studies of the nude are often faulty, mere memo- 
randa of attitude and gesture. The human form 
was interesting to him either scientifically or else as 
an index to the soul. Yet he felt the influence of 
personal loveliness. His favorite pupil Salaino 
was a youth 'of singular grace, with curled and 
waving hair, a feature of personal beauty by which 
Lionardo was always greatly pleased.' Hair, the 
most mysterious of human things, the most manifold 
in form and hue, snake-like in its subtlety for the 
entanglement of souls, had naturally supreme attrac- 
tiveness for the magician of the arts. 

* Shelley says of the poet : 

He will watch from dawn till gloom 
The lake-reflected sun illume 
The yellow bees in the ivy "bloom ; 
Nor heed nor see what things they be. 
But from these create he can 
Forms more real than living man. 
Nurslings of immortality. 



3i8 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY, 

With like energy Lionardo bent himself to divine 
the import of ugliness. Whole pages of his sketch- 
book are filled with squalid heads of shriveled 
crones and ghastly old men — with idiots, goitred 
cretins, criminals, and clowns. It was not that he 
loved the horrible for its own sake; but he was 
determined to seize character, to command the 
gamut of human physiognomy from ideal beauty 
down to forms bestialized by vice and disease. The 
story related by Giraldi concerning the head of Judas 
in the Cenacolo at Milan sufficiently illustrates the 
method of Lionardo in creating types and the utility 
of such caricatures as his note-books contain.^ 

It is told that he brought into his room one day 
a collection of reptiles — lizards, newts, toads, vipers, 
efts — all creatures that are loathsome to the common 
eye. These, by the magic of imagination, he com- 
bined into a shape so terrible that those who saw it 
shuddered. Medusa's snake-enwoven head exhaling 
poisonous vapor from the livid lips ; Leda, swan- 
like beside her swan lover; Chimsera, in whom 
many natures mingled and made one ; the conflict 
of a dragon and a lion ; S. John, conceived not as a 
prophet, but as a vine-crowned Faun, the harbinger 
of joy — over pictorial motives of this kind, attractive 
by reason of their complexity or mystery, he loved 

' See De Stendhal, ' Histoire de la Peinture en Italic,' p. 143, for 
this story. 



DOUBLE INTERESTS OF THE RENAISSANCE. 319 

to brood ; and to this fascination of a sphinx-like 
charm we owe some of his most exquisite drawings 
Lionardo more than any other artist who has ever 
lived (except perhaps his great predecessor Leo 
Battista Alberti) felt the primal sympathies that bind 
men to the earth, their mother, and to living things, 
their brethren.^ Therefore the borderland between 
humanity and nature allured him with a spell half 
aesthetic and half scientific. In the dawn of Hellas 
this sympathetic apprehension of the world around 
him would have made him a supreme mythopoet. 
In the dawn of the modern world curiosity claimed 
the lion's share of his genius : nor can it be denied 
that his art suffered by this division of interests. The 
time was not yet come for accurate physiological 
investigation, or for the true birth of the scientific 
spirit ; and in any age it would have been difficult 
for one man to establish on a sound basis discoveries 
made in so many realms as those explored by Lio- 
nardo. We can not therefore but regret that he was 
not more exclusively a painter. If, however, he had 
confined his activity to the production of works equal 
to the Cenacolo, we should have missed the most 
complete embodiment in one personahty of the two- 

^ In the ' Treatise on Painting,' Da Vinci argues strongly against 
isolating man. He regarded the human being as in truth a microcosm 
to be only understood in relation to the world around him, expressing, 
as a painter, the same thought as Pico. (See 'Revival of Learning,' 
p. 49.) Therefore he urges the claims of landscape on the attention of 
artists. 



320 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

fold impulses of the Renaissance and of its boundless 
passion for discovery. 

Lionardo's turn for physical science led him to 
study the technicalities of art with fervent industry. 
Whatever his predecessors had acquired in the 
knowledge of materials, the chemistry of colors, 
the mathematics of composition, the laws of perspec- 
tive, and the illusions of chiaroscuro he developed 
to the utmost. To find a darker darkness and a 
brighter brightness than had yet been shown upon 
the painter's canvas; to solve problems of fore- 
shortening; to deceive the eye by finely -graduated 
tones and subtle touches ; to submit the freest play of 
form to simple figures of geometry in grouping, were 
among the objects he most earnestly pursued. At 
the same time his deep feeling for all things that 
have life gave him new power in the delineation of 
external nature. The branching of flower-stems, 
the outlines of fig-leaves, the attitudes of beasts and 
birds in motion, the arching of the fan-palm, were 
rendered by him with the same consummate skill as 
the dimple on a cheek or the fine curves of a young 
man's lips.^ Wherever he perceived a difficulty, he 



^ I might refer in detail to four studies of bramble branches, leaves, 
and flowers and fruit, in the Royal Collection at Windsor, most wonder- 
ful for patient accuracy and delicate execution ; also to drawings of 
oak-leaves, wild guelder-rose, broom, columbine, asphodel, bull-rush, 
and wood-spurge in the same collection. These careful studies are 
as valuable for the botanist as for the artist. To render the specific 
character of each plant with greater precision would be impossible. 



LOVE OF STRANGE THINGS. 321 

approached and conquered it. Love, which is the 
soul of art — Love, the bond-slave of Beauty and the 
son of Poverty by Craft — led him to these triumphs. 
He used to buy caged birds in the market-place that 
he might let them loose. He was attached to horses, 
and kept a sumptuous stable ; and these he would 
draw in eccentric attitudes, studying their anatomy 
in detail for his statue of Francesco Sforza.^ In the 
Battle of the Standard, known to us only by a sketch 
of Rubens,^ he gave passions to the horse — not 
human passion, nor yet merely equine — but such as 
horses might feel when placed upon a par with men. 
In like manner the warriors are fiery with bestial 
impulses — leonine fury, wolfish ferocity, fox-like 
cunning. Their very armor takes the shape of 
monstrous reptiles. To such an extent did the 
interchange of human and animal properties haunt 
Lionardo's fancy. 

From what has been already said we shall be 
better able to understand Lionardo's love of the 
bizarre and grotesque. One day a vine-dresser 
brought him a very curious lizard. The master 
fitted it with wings injected with quicksilver to 

* See the series of anatomical studies of the horse in the Royal 
Collection. 

"^ Engraved by Edelinck. The drawing has obvious Lionardesque 
qualities ; but how far it may be from the character of the original we 
can guess by Rubens' transcript from Mantegna. (See above, p. 274.) 
De Stendhal says wittily of this work, * C'est Virgile traduit par 
Madame de Stael,' op. cit. p. 162. 



322 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

give them motion as the creature crawled. Eyes, 
horns, and a beard, a marvelous dragon's mask, 
were placed upon its head. This strange beast 
lived in a cage, where Lionardo tamed it ; but no 
one, says Vasari, dared so much as to look at it.^ 
On quaint puzzles and perplexing schemes he mused 
a good part of his life away. At one time he was 
for making wings to fly with ; at another he in- 
vented ropes that should uncoil, strand by strand ; 
again, he devised a system of flat corks by means 
of which to walk on water.^ One day, after having 
scraped the intestines of a sheep so thin that he 
could hold them in the hollow of his hand, he filled 
them with wind from a bellows, and blew and blew 
until the room was choked, and his visitors had 
to run into corners. Lionardo told them that this 
was a proper symbol of genius. 

Such stories form w^hat may be called the legend 
of Lionardo's life ; and some of them seem simple, 
others almost childish.^ They illustrate what is 

' In the Royal Collection at Windsor there are anatomical draw- 
ings for the construction of an imaginary quadruped with gigantic 
claws. The bony, muscular, and venous structure of its legs and feet 
is accurately indicated. 

^ See the drawings engraved and published by Gerli in his ' Disegni 
di Lionardo da Vinci,' Milan, 1784. 

^ Vasari is the chief source of these legends. Giraldi, Lomazzo, the 
Milanese historian of painting, and Bandello, the novelist, supply fur- 
ther details. It appears from all accounts that Lionardo impressed 
his contemporaries as a singular and most commanding personality. 
There is a touch of reverence in even the strangest stories, which is 
wanting in the legend of Piero di Cosimo. 



DISLIKE OF FINISHING, 323 

meant when we call him the wizard of the Renais- 
sance. Art, nature, life, the mysteries of existence, 
the infinite capacity of human thought, the riddle 
of the world, all that the Greeks called Pan, so 
swayed and allured him that, while he dreamed 
and wrought and never ceased from toil, he seemed 
to have achieved but little. The fancies of his 
brain were, perhaps, too subtle and too fragile to 
be made apparent to the eyes of men. He was wont, 
after years of labor, to leave his work still incom- 
plete, feeling that he could not perfect it as he de- 
sired ; yet even his most fragmentary sketches have a 
finish beyond the scope of lesser men. * Extraordi- 
nary power,' says Vasari, * was in his case conjoined 
with remarkable facility, a mind of regal boldness 
and magnanimous daring.' Yet he was constantly 
accused of indolence and inability to execute.^ Often 
and often he made vast preparations and accom- 
plished nothing. It is well known how the Prior 
of S. Maria delle Grazie complained that Lionardo 
stood for days looking at his fresco, and for week$ 
never came near it ; how the monks of the Annun- 
ziata at Florence were cheated out of their painting, 
lor which elaborate designs had yet been made ; how 
Leo X., seeing him mix oils with varnish to make 

^ Even Michael Angelo, meeting him in Florence, flung in his 
teeth that * he had made the model of a horse to cast in bronze, and 
could not cast it, and through shame left it as it was, unfinished.' Sec 
•Arch. St. It.,' serie terza, xvi. 226. 



324 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

a new medium, exclaimed, *Alas! this man will 
do nothing ; he thinks of the end before he makes 
a beginning.' A good answer to account for the 
delay was always ready on the painter's lips, as that 
the man of genius works most when his hands are 
idlest ; Judas, sought in vain through all the thieves* 
resorts in Milan, is not found ; I can not hope to see 
the face of Christ except in Paradise. Again, when 
an equestrian statue of Francesco Sforza had been 
modeled in all its parts, another model was begun be- 
cause Da Vinci would fain show the warrior triumph- 
ing over a fallen foe.^ The first motive seemed to 
him tame; the second was unrealizable in bronze. 
* I can do any thing possible to man,' he wrote to 
Lodovico Sforza, *and as well as any living artist 
either in sculpture or painting.' But he would do 
nothing as task-work, and his creative brain loved 
better to invent than to execute.^ * Of a truth,' 
continues his biographer, * there is good reason to 
believe that the very greatness of his most exalted 

* In the Royal Collection at Windsor there is a whole series of 
studies for these two statues, together with drawings for the mold in 
which Lionardo intended to cast them. The second of the two is 
sketched with great variety of motive. The horse is rearing; the 
fallen enemy is vainly striving to defend himself; the victor in one 
drawing is reining in his steed, in another is waving a truncheon, in a 
third is brandishing his sword, in a fourth is holding the sword in act 
to thrust. The designs for the pedestals, sometimes treated as a tomb 
and sometimes as a fountain, are equally varied. 

^ * Concevoir,' said Balzac, ' c'est jouir, c'est fumer des cigarettes 
enchantees ; mais sans I'exdcution tout s'en va en r^ve et en fumee.' 
Quoted by Sainte Beuve, 'Causeries du Lundi/ vol. ii. p. 353. 



FATE OF LIONARDaS MASTERPIECES, 325 

mind, aiming at more than could be effected, was 
itself an impediment ; perpetually seeking to add 
excellence to excellence and perfection to perfection. 
This was without doubt the true hinderance, so that, 
as our Petrarch has it, the work was retarded by 
desire/ At the close of that cynical and positive 
century, the spirit whereof was so well expressed 
by Cosimo de* Medici,* Lionardo set before him- 
self aims infinite instead of finite. His designs of 
wings to fly with symbolize his whole endeavor. 
He believed in solving the insoluble ; and nature 
had so richly dowered him in the very dawn-time 
of discovery that he was almost justified in this 
delusion. Having caught the Proteus of the world, 
he tried to grasp him ; but the god changed shape 
beneath his touch. Having surprised Silenus asleep, 
he begged from him a song ; but the song Silenus 
sang was so marvelous in its variety, so subtle in 
its modulations, that Lionardo could do no more 
than recall scattered phrases. His Proteus was 
the spirit of the Renaissance. The Silenus from 
whom he forced the song was the double nature 
of man and of the world. 

By ill chance it happened that Lionardo's 
greatest works soon perished. His cartoon at Flor- 
ence disappeared. His model for Sforza's statue 
was used as a target by French bowmen. His 

* See * Revival of Learning,' p. 177. 



326 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

Last Supper remains a mere wreck in the Convent 
delle Grazie. Such as it is, blurred by ill-usage 
and neglect, more blurred by impious repainting, 
that fresco must be seen by those who wish to 
understand Da Vinci. It has well been called the 
compendium of all his studies and of all his writings ; 
and, chronologically, it is the first masterpiece of 
the perfected Renaissance.^ Other painters had 
represented the Last Supper as a solemn prologue 
to the Passion, or as the mystical inauguration of 
the greatest Christian sacrament.^ But none had 
dared to break the calm of the event by a dramatic 
action. The school of Giotto, Fra Angelico, Ghir- 
landajo, Perugino, even Signorelli, remained within 
the sphere of symbolical suggestion ; and their 
work gained in dignity what it lost in intensity. 
Lionardo combined both. He undertook to paint 
a moment, to delineate the effect of a single word 
upon twelve men seated at a table, and to do this 
without sacrificing the tranquillity demanded by 
ideal art, and without impairing the divine majesty 
of Him from whose lips that word has fallen. The 
time has long gone by for detailed criticism, or 
description of a painting known to every body. It 

* It was finished, according to Fra Paciolo, in 1498. 

' Signorelli, with his usual originality, chose the moment when 
Christ broke bread and gave it to His disciples. In that rare picture 
at Cortona we see not the betrayed Chief, but the founder of a new 
religion. 



THE CENACOLO. 327 

is enough to observe that the ideal representation 
of a dramatic moment, the life breathed into each 
part of the composition, the variety of the types 
chosen to express varieties of character, and the 
scientific distribution of the twelve apostles in four 
groups of three around the central Christ, mark 
the appearance of a new spirit of power and free- 
dom in the arts. What had hitherto been treated 
ivith religious timidity, with conventional stiffness, 
or with realistic want of grandeur, was now human- 
ized and at the same time transported into a higher 
intellectual region ; and though Lionardo discrowned 
the apostles of their aureoles, he for the first time 
in the history of painting created a Christ not un- 
worthy to be worshiped as the prcesens Deus, 
We know not whether to admire most the perfec- 
tion of the painter's art or his insight into spiritual 
things.^ 

If we are forced to feel that, with Da Vinci, 
accomplishment fell short of power and promise, 

* The Cenacolo alone will not enable the student to understand 
Lionardo. He must give his attention to the master's sketch-books, 
those studies in chalk, in tempera, on thin canvas and paper, prepared 
for the stylus or the pen, v^hich Vasari calls the final triumphs of 
designing, and of which, in spite of the loss of many of his books, the 
surviving specimens are very numerous. Some are easily accessible in 
Gerli, Chamberlaine, and the autotype reproductions. It is possible 
that a sympathetic student may get closer to the all-em.bracing and all- 
daring genius of the magician through these drawings than if he had 
before him an elaborate work in fresco or in oils. They express the 
many-sided, mobile, curious, and subtle genius of the man in its 
entirety. 



328 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

the case is veiy different with Raphael. In him 
there was no perplexity, no division of interests. 
He was fascinated by no insoluble mystery and 
absorbed by no seductive problems. His faculty 
and his artistic purpose were exactly balanced, ade- 
quate, and mutually supporting. He saw by intui- 
tion what to do, and he did it without let or 
hinderance, exercising from his boyhood till his early 
death an unimpeded energy of pure productiveness. 
Like Mozart, to whom he bears in many respects 
a remarkable resemblance, Raphael was gifted with 
inexhaustible fertility and with unwearied industry. 
Like Mozart, again, he had a nature which con- 
verted every thing to beauty. Thought, passion, emo- 
tion, became in his art living melody. We almost 
forget his strength in admiration of his grace ; the 
travail of his intellect is hidden by the serenity 
of his style. There is nothing overmuch in any 
portion of his work, no sense of effort, no straining 
of a situation, not even that element of terror need- 
ful to the true sublime. It is as though the spirit 
of young Greece had lived in him again, purifying 
his taste to perfection and restraining him from 
the delineation of things stern or horrible. 

Raphael found in this world nothing but its 
joy, and communicated to his ideal the beauty of 
untouched virginity. Brescia might be sacked with 
sword and flame. The Baglioni might hew them- 



RAPHAELS FACILITY AND FERTILITY, 329 

selves to pieces in Perugia. The plains of Ravenna 
might flow with blood. Urbino might change 
masters and obey the viperous Duke Valentino. 
Raphael, meanwhile, working through his short 
May-life of less than twenty years, received from 
nature and from man a message that was harmony 
unspoiled by one discordant note. His very per- 
son was a symbol of his genius. Lionardo was 
beautiful but stately, with firm lips and penetrating 
glance ; he conquered by the magnetism of an in- 
calculable personality. The loveliness of Raphael 
was fair and flexible, fascinating not by power or 
mystery, but by the winning charm of open-hearted 
sweetness. To this physical beauty, rather delicate 
than strong, he united spiritual graces of the most 
amiable nature. He was gentle, docile, modest, 
ready to oblige, free from jealousy, binding all 
men to him by his cheerful courtesy.^ In morals 
he was pure. Indeed, judged by the lax standard of 
those times, he might be called almost immaculate. 
His intellectual capacity, in all that concerned the 
art of painting, was unbounded ; but we can not 
place him among the many-sided heroes of the 
Renaissance. What he attempted in sculpture, 

' • Raffaello, che era la gentilezza stessa .... restavano vinti 
dalla cortesia e dall' arte sua, ma piu cal genio della sua buona natura ; 
la quale era si piena di gentilezza e si colma di carita, che egli si 
vedeva che fino agli animali I'onoravano, non che gli uomini.' — Vasari, 
vol. viii. pp. 6, 60. 



330 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

though elegant, is comparatively insignificant ; and 
the same may be said about his buildings. As a 
painter he was capable of comprehending and ex- 
pressing all things without excess or sense of la- 
bor. Of no other artist do we feel that he wa? 
so instinctively, unerringly right in what he thought 
and did. 

Among his mental faculties the power of assim- 
ilation seems to have been developed to an ex- 
traordinary degree. He learned the rudiments of 
his art in the house of his father Santi at Urbino, 
where a Madonna is still shown — the portrait of 
his mother, with a child, perhaps the infant Raphael, 
upon her lap. Starting, soon after his father's death, 
as a pupil of Perugino, he speedily acquired that 
master's manner so perfectly that his earliest works 
are only to be distinguished from Perugino's by 
their greater delicacy, spontaneity, and inventive- 
ness. Though he absorbed all that was excellent 
in the Peruginesque style, he avoided its affectations, 
and seemed to take departure for a higher flight 
from the most exquisite among his teacher's early 
paintings. Later on, while still a lad, he escaped 
from Umbrian conventionality by learning all that 
was valuable in the art of Masaccio and Fra Bar- 
tolommeo. To the latter master, himself educated 
by the influence of Lionardo, Raphael owed more, 
perhaps, than to any other of his teachers. The 



RAPHAEL'S ASSIMILATIVE FACULTY. 331 

method of combining figures in masses, needful 
to the general composition, while they preserve a 
subordinate completeness of their own, had been 
applied with almost mathematical precision by the 
Frate in his fresco at S. Maria Nuova.* It re- 
appears in all Raphael's work subsequent to his 
first visit to Florence^ (i 504-1 506). So great, in- 
deed, is the resemblance of treatment between the 
two painters that we know not well which owed 
the other most. Many groups of women and 
children in the Stanze, for example^especially in 
the Miracle of Bolsena and the Heliodorus — seem 
almost identical with Fra Bartolommeo's Madonna 
della Misericordia at Lucca. Finally, when Raphael 
settled in Rome, he laid himself open to the influ- 
ence of Michael Angelo, and drank in the classic 
spirit from the newly-discovered antiques. Here 
at last it seemed as though his native genius 
might suffer from contact with the potent style of 
his great rival ; and there are many students of 
art who feel that Raphael's later manner was a 
declension from the divine purity of his early pic- 
tures. There is, in fact, a something savoring 
of overbloom in the Farnesina frescoes, as though 
the painter's faculty had been strained beyond its 

^ See above, p. 306. 

^ The ' Holy Family ' at Munich, and the ' Madonna del Baldac- 
chino ' in the Pitti, might be mentioned as experiments on Raphael's 
part to perfect the Frate's scheme of composition. 



332 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

natural force. Muscles are exaggerated to give 
the appearance of strength, and open mouths are 
multiplied to indicate astonishment and action. 
These faults may be found even in the Cartoons. 
Yet who shall say that Raphael's power was on 
the decline, or that his noble style was passing 
into mannerism, after studying both the picture of 
the Transfiguration and the careful drawings from 
the nude prepared for this last work ? 

So delicate was the assimilative tendency in 
Raphael that what he learned from all his teachers, 
from Perugino, Fra Bartolommeo, Masaccio, Da 
Vinci, Michael Angelo, and the antique, was mingled 
with his own style without sacrifice of individuality. 
Inferior masters imitated him, and passed their pic- 
tures off upon posterity as Raphael's ; but to mistake 
a genuine piece of his painting for the performance 
of another is almost impossible. Each successive 
step he made was but a liberation of his genius, 
a stride tov\^ard the full expression of the beautiful 
he saw and served. He was never an eclectic. 
The masterpieces of other artists taught him how 
to comprehend his own ideal. 

Raphael is not merely a man, but a school. Just 
as in his genius he absorbed and comprehended 
many divers styles, so are many worthy craftsmen 
included in his single name. Fresco-painters, mas- 
ters of the easel, workmenjn mosaic and marquetrie, 



THE RANGE OF HIS WORKS. 333 

sculptors, builders, arras-weavers, engravers, deco- 
rators of ceilings and of floors, all labored under 
his eye, receiving designs from his hand, and exe- 
cuting what was called thereafter by his name.^ It 
was thus partly by his facility and energy, partly by 
the use he made of other men, that Raphael was 
able to achieve so much. In the Vatican he covered 
the walls and ceilings of the Stanze with historical 
and symbolical frescoes that embrace the whole of 
human knowledge. The cramping limits of ecclesi- 
astical tradition are transcended. The synod of the 
antique sages finds a place beside the synod of the 
fathers and the company of saints. Parnassus and 
the allegory of the virtues front each other. The 
legend of Marsyas and the my thus of the Fall 
are companion pictures. A new catholicity, a new 
orthodoxy of the beautiful, appears. The Renais- 
sance in all its breadth and liberality of judgment 
takes ideal form. Nor is there any sense of discord ; 
for the genius of Raphael views both revelations, 
Christian and pagan, from a point of view of art 
above them. To his pure and unimpeded faculty 
the task of translating motives so diverse into mu- 
tually concordant shapes was easy. On the domed 
ceilings of the Loggie he painted sacred history in 

* See Vasari, vol. viii. p. 60, for a description of the concord that 

reigned in this vast w^orkshop. The genius and the gentle nature of 

Raphael penetrated the whole group of artists, and seemed to give 
them a single soul. 



334 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY, 

a series of exquisitely simple compositions, known 
as Raphael's Bible. The walls and pilasters were 
adorned with arabesques that anticipated the dis- 
covery of Pompeii, and surpassed the best of Roman 
frescoes in variety and freedom. With his own 
hands he colored the incomparable Triumph of 
Galatea in Agostino Chigi's villa on the Tiber, while 
his pupils traced the legend of Cupid and Psyche 
from his drawings on the roof of the great banquet- 
hall. Remaining within the circuit of Rome, we may 
turn from the sibyls of S. Maria della Pace to the 
genii of the planets in S. Maria del Popolo, from the 
Violin-player of the Sciarra palace to the Trans- 
figuration in the Vatican : wherever we go, we find 
the masterpieces of this youth, so various in concep- 
tion, so equal in performance. And then, to think 
that the palaces and picture-galleries of Europe are 
crowded with his easel-pictures, that his original 
drawings display a boundless store of prodigal in- 
ventive creativeness, that the Cartoons, of which 
England is proud, are alone enough to found a 
mighty master's fame ! 

The vast mass of Raphael's works is by itself 
astounding. The accuracy of their design and the 
perfection of their execution are literally overwhelm- 
ing to the imagination that attempts to realize the 
conditions of his short life. There is nothing, or 
but very little, of rhetoric in all this world of pic- 



TBEIR MENTAL SCOPE AND VARIETY, 33s 

tures. The brain has guided the hand throughout, 
and the result is sterling poetry. The knowledge, 
again, expressed in many of his frescoes is so thor- 
ough that we wonder whether in his body lived 
again the soul of some accomplished sage. How, 
for example, did he appropriate the history of phi- 
losophy, set forth so luminously in the School of 
Athens, that each head, each gesture, is the epitome 
of some system? Fabio Calvi may, indeed, have 
supplied him with serviceable notes on Greek phi- 
losophy. But to Raphael alone belongs the triumph 
of having personified the dry elements of learning in 
appropriate living forms. The same is true of the 
Parnassus, and, in a less degree, of the Disputa, 
To the physiognomist these frescoes will always be 
invaluable. The Heliodorus, the Miracle of Bol- 
sena, and the Cartoons display a like faculty applied 
with more dramatic purpose. Passion and action 
take the place of representative ideas ; but the ca- 
pacity for translating into perfect human form what 
has first been intellectually anprehended by the 
artist is the same. 

If, after estimating the range of thought revealed 
in this portion of Raphael's work, we next consider 
the labor of the mind involved in the distribution 
of so many multitudes of beautiful and august human 
figures, in the modeling of their drapery, the study 
of their expression, and their grouping into balanced 



336 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

compositions, we may form some notion of the mag- 
nitude of Raphael's performance. It is, indeed, prob- 
able that all attempts at reflective analysis of this 
kind do injustice to the spontaneity of the painter's 
method. Yet, even supposing that the Miraculous 
Draught of Fishes or the School of Athens were seen 
by him as in a vision, this presumption will increase 
our wonder at the imagination which could hold 
so rich a store of details ready for immediate use. 
That Raphael paid the most minute attention to the 
details of his work is shown by the studies made 
for these two subjects, and by the drawings for the 
Transfiguration. A young man bent on putting 
forth his power for the first time in a single picture 
that should prove his mastery could not have 
labored with more diligence than Raphael at the 
height of his fame and in full possession of his 
matured faculty. 

When, furthermore, we take into account the 
variety of Raphael's work, we arrive at a new point 
of wonder. The drawing oi Alexander* s Marriage 
with Roxana, the Temptation of Adam by Eve, and 
the Massacre of the Innocents, engraved by Marc 
Antonio, are unsurpassed not only as compositions, 
but also as studies of the nude in chosen attitudes, 
powerfully felt and nobly executed, In these de- 
signs, which he never used for painting, the same 
high style is successively applied to a pageant, an 



RAPHAEL'S HUMANITY. 337 

Idyl, and a drama.^ The rapture of Greek art in 
its most youthful moment has never been recaptured 
by a modern painter with more force and fire of 
fancy than in the Galatea. The tenderness of 
Christian feeling has found no more exalted expres- 
sion than in the multitudes of the Madonnas, each 
more lovely than another, like roses on a tree in 
June, from the maidenly Madonna del Gran Duca 
to the celestial vision of the San Sisto, that sub- 
limest lyric of the art of Catholicity.^ It is only 
by hurrying through a Hst like this that we can ap- 
preciate the many-sided perfection of Raphael's 
accomplishment. How, lastly, was it possible that 
this young painter should have found the time to 
superintend the building of S. Peter's, and to form 
a plan for excavating Rome in its twelve ancient 
regions ? ^ 

When Lomazzo assigned emblems to the chief 
painters of the Renaissance, he gave to Michael 
Angelo the dragon of contemplation, and to Man- 
tegna the serpent of sagacity. For Raphael, by a 
happier instinct, he reserved man, the microcosm, 

* The Fresco of ' Alexander ' in the Palazzo Borghese is by an 
imitator. 

^ The ' Madonna di San Sisto ' was painted for a banner to be 
borne in processions. It is a subtle observation of Rio that the ban- 
ner, an invention of the Umbrian school, corresponds in painting to 
the hymn in poetry. 

^ See ' Revival of Learning,' p. 437, for Raphael's letter on this 
subject to Leo X. 



338 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

the symbol of powerful grace, incarnate intellect 
This quaint fancy of the Milanese critic touches 
the truth. What distinguishes the whole work of 
Raphael is its humanity in the double sense of 
the humane and human. Phoebus, as imagined by 
the Greeks, was not more radiant, more victorious 
by the marvel of his smile, more intolerant of 
things obscene or ugly. Like Apollo chasing the 
Eumenides from his Delphian shrine, Raphael will 
not suffer his eyes to fall on what is loathsome 
or horrific. Even sadness and sorrow, tragedy and 
death, take loveliness from him. And here it must 
be mentioned that he shunned stem and painful 
subjects. He painted no martyrdom, no Last Judg- 
fnent, and no Crucifixion, if we except the little early 
picture belonging to Lord Dudley.^ His men and 
women are either glorious with youth or dignified in 
hale old age. Touched by his innocent and earnest 
genius, mankind is once more gifted with the har- 
mony of intellect and flesh and feeling that be- 
longed to Hellas. Instead of asceticism, Hellenic 
temperance is the virtue prized by Raphael. Over 

* * La Spasimo di Sicilia ' is the single Passion picture of Raphael's 
maturity. The predella of 'Christ carrying the Cross,' at Leigh 
Court, and the 'Christ showing his Wounds,' in the Tosi Gallery at 
Brescia, are both early works painted under Umbrian influence. The 
Borghese * Entombment,' painted for Atalanta Baglioni, a pen and ink 
drawing of the ' Pieta ' in the Louvre collection, Marc Antonio's en- 
graving of the ' Massacre of the Innocents,' and an early picture of the 
' Agony in the Garden,' are all the other painful subjects I can now re- 
member. 



CORREGGIO'S GLADNESS. 339 

his niche in the Temple of Fame might be written, 
' I have said ye are gods ; ' for the children of men 
in his ideal world are divinized. The god-like spirit 
of man is all in all. Happy indeed was the art that 
by its limitations and selections could thus early ex- 
press the good news of the Renaissance ; while in the 
spheres of politics and ethics, science and religion, 
we are still so far from having learned its lesson. 

Correggio is the Faun or Ariel of Renaissance 
painting. Turning to him from Raphael, we are 
naturally first struck by the affinities and differences 
between them. Both drew from their study of the 
world the elements of joy which it contains ; but the 
gladness of Correggio was more sensuous than that 
of Raphael ; his intellectual faculties were less 
developed ; his rapture was more tumultuous and 
Bacchantic. Like Raphael, Correggio died young ; 
but his brief life was spent in comparative obscurity 
and solitude. Far from the society of scholars and 
artists, ignorant of courts, unpatronized by princes, 
he wrought for himself alone the miracle of bright- 
ness and of movement that delights us in his frescoes 
and his easel-pictures. 

Like a poet hidden 

In the Hght of thought, 
Singing hymns unbidden, 

was this lyrist of luxurious ecstasy. In his work 
there was nothing worldly ; that divides him from 



340 RENAISSANCE IN ITAL V. 

the Venetians, whose sensuousness he shared: 
nothing scientific ; that distinguishes him from Da 
Vinci, the magic of whose chiaroscuro he com- 
prehended: nothing contemplative; that separates 
him from Michael Angelo, the audacity of whose 
design in dealing with forced attitudes he rivaled, 
without apparently having enjoyed the opportunity 
of studying his works. The cheerfulness of Ra- 
phael, the wizardry of Lionardo, and the bold- 
ness of Michael Angelo met in him to form a new 
style, the originality of which is indisputable, and 
which takes us captive — not by intellectual power, 
but by the impulse of emotion. Of his artistic 
education we know nothing ; and when we call 
him the Ariel of painting, this means that we are 
compelled to think of him as an elemental spirit, 
whose bidding the air and the light and the hues 
of the morning obey. 

Correggio created a world of beautiful human 
beings, the whole condition of whose existence is 
an innocent and radiant wantonness.^ Over the 
domain of tragedy he had no sway ; nor could he 
deal with subjects demanding pregnancy of intel- 
lectual meaning. He paints the three Fates, for 
instance, like young and joyous Bacchantes ; if we 
placed rose-garlands and thyrsi in their hands in- 

* For a fuller working out of this analysis I must refer to my 
•'Sketches in Italy,' article ' Parma.' Much that follows is a quotation 
from that essay. 



FEELING FOR LIGHT AND COLOR, 34' 

Stead of the distaff and the thread of human des- 
tinies, they might figure upon the panels of a 
banquet-chamber in Pompeii. Nor, again, did he 
possess that severe and lofty art of composition 
which seeks the highest beauty of design in archi- 
tectural harmony supreme above the melodies of 
gracefulness in detail. He was essentially a lyrical 
as distinguished from an epical or dramatic poet. 
The unity of his work is derived from the effect of 
light and atmosphere, the inbreathed soul of tremu- 
lous and throbbing life, which bathes and liquefies 
the whole. It was enough for him to produce a 
gleeful symphony by the play of light and color, 
by the animation of his figures, and by the intoxi- 
cating beauty of his forms. His angels are genii 
disimprisoned from the chalices of flowers, houris 
of an erotic Paradise, elemental sprites of nature 
wantoning in Eden in her prime. They belong to 
the generation of the fauns. Like fauns, they 
combine a certain wildness, a dithyrambic ecstasy, 
a delight in rapid motion as they revel amid clouds 
and flowers, with the permanent and all-pervading 
sweetness of the painter^s style. Correggio's sensi- 
bility to light and color — that quality which makes 
him unique among painters — was on a par with his 
feeling for form. Brightness and darkness are 
woven together on his figures like an impalpable 
veil, aerial and transparent, enhancing the palpita- 



342 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY, 

tions of voluptuous movement which he loved. His 
coloring does not glow or burn ; blithesome and 
delicate, it seems exactly such a beauty-bloom as 
sense requires for its satiety. That cord of jocund 
color which may fitly be combined with the smiles 
of daylight, the clear blues found in laughing eyes, 
the pinks that tinge the cheeks of early youth, and 
the warm yet silvery tones of healthy flesh, mingle, 
as in a pearl-shell, on his pictures. Within his own 
magic circle Correggio reigns supreme; no other 
artist having blent the witcheries of coloring, chiar- 
oscuro, and wanton loveliness of form into a har- 
mony so perfect in its sensuous charm. To feel 
his influence, and at the same moment to be the 
subject of strong passion, or intense desire, or 
heroic resolve, or profound contemplation, or pen- 
sive melancholy, is impossible. The Northern trav- 
eler, standing beneath his master-works in Parma, 
may hear from each of those radiant and laughing 
faces what the young Italian said to Goethe : Perctie 
pensa ? pensando s'znvecckm. 

Michael Angelo is the prophet or seer of the 
Renaissance. It would be impossible to imagine a 
stronger contrast than that which distinguishes his 
art from Correggio's, or lives more different in all 
their details than those which he and Raphael or 
Lionardo lived respectively. During the eighty-nine 
years of his earthly pilgrimage he saw Italy enslaved 



MICHAEL ANGELO'S EARNESTNESS, 343 

and Florence extinguished ; it was his exceeding bitter 
fate to watch the rapid decay of the arts and to wit- 
ness the triumph of sacerdotal despotism over liberal 
thought. To none of these things was he indifferent ; 
and the sorrow they wrought in his soul found ex- 
pression in his painting.^ Michael Angelo was not 
framed by nature to fascinate like Lionardo, or to 
charm like Raphael. His manners were severe and 
simple. When he spoke, his words were brief and 
pungent. When he wrote, whether in poetry or prose, 

* Much of the controversy about Michael Angelo which is con- 
tinually being waged between his admirers and his detractors might 
be set at rest if it were acknowledged that there are two distinct ways 
of judging works of art. We may regard them simply as appealing to 
our sense of beauty, and affording harmonious intellectual pleasure. 
Or we may regard them as expressing the thought and spirit of their 
age, and as utterances made by men whose hearts burned within 
them. Critics trained in the study of good Greek sculpture, or in- 
clined by temperament to admire the earlier products of Italian paint- 
ing, are apt to pursue the former path exclusively. They demand 
serenity and simplicity. Perturbation and violence they denounce as 
blemishes. It does not occur to them that, though the phenomenon is 
certainly rare, it does occasionally happen that a man arises whose 
art is for him the language of his soul, and who lives in sympathetic 
relation to the sternest interests of his age. If such an artist be bom 
when tranquil thought and serene emotions are impossible for one who 
feels the meaning of his times with depth, he must either paint and 
carve lies or he must abandon the serenity that was both natural and 
easy to the Greek and the earlier Italian. Michael Angelo was one of 
these select artistic natures. He used his chisel and his pencil to 
express not merely beautiful artistic motives, but what he felt and 
thought about the world in which he had to live : and this world was full 
of the ruin of republics, the corruption and humiliation of society, the 
subjection of Italy to strangers. In Michael Angelo the student of 
both art and history finds an inestimably precious and rare point of 
contact between the inner spirit of an age and its external expression 
in sculpture and painting. 



344 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY, 

he used the fewest phrases to express the most con- 
densed meaning. When asked why he had not mar- 
ried, he replied that the wife he had — his art — cost 
him already too much trouble. He entertained few 
friends, and shunned society. Brooding over the 
sermons of Savonarola, the text of the Bible, the 
discourses of Plato, and the poems of Dante, he made 
his spirit strong in solitude by the companionship 
with everlasting thoughts. Therefore, when he was 
called to paint the Sistine Chapel, he uttered through 
painting the weightiest prophecy the world has ever 
seen expressed in plastic form. His theme is nothing 
less than the burden of the prophets and the sibyls 
who preached the coming of a light upon the world, 
and the condemnation of the world which had re- 
jected it by an inexorable judge. Michelet says, not 
without truth, that the spirit of Savonarola lives again 
in these frescoes. The procession of the four-and- 
twenty elders, arraigned before the people of Bres- 
cia to accuse Italy of sin — the voice that cried to 
Florence, * Behold the sword of the Lord, and that 
swiftly ! Behold I, even I, do bring a deluge on 
the earth ! ' are both seen and heard here very 
plainly. But there is more than Savonarola in this 
prophecy of Michael Angelo's. It contains the 
stern spirit of Dante, aflame with patriotism, pas- 
sionate for justice. It embodies the philosophy of 
Plato. The creative God, who divides light from dark- 



HIS PROPHECY. 345 

ness, who draws Adam from the clay and calls forth 
new-born Eve in awful beauty, is the Demiurgus of 
the Greek. Again, it carries the indignation of 
Isaiah, the wild denunciations of Ezekiel, the mo- 
notonous refrain of Jeremiah — 'Ah, Lord, Lord!* 
The classic Sibyls intone their mystic hymns; the 
Delphic on her tripod of inspiration, the Erythraean 
bending over her scrolls, the withered witch of 
Cumae, the parched prophetess of Libya— all seem 
to cry, * Repent, repent ! for the kingdom of the 
spirit is at hand ! Repent and awake, for the judg- 
ment of the world approaches ! ' And above these 
voices we hear a most tremendous wail : * The na- 
tions have come to the birth ; but there is not 
strength to bring forth/ That is the utterance of 
the Renaissance, as it had appeared in Italy, She 
who was first among the nations was now last ; 
bound and bleeding, she lay prostrate at the temple- 
gate she had unlocked. To Michael Angelo was 
given for his portion — not the alluring mysteries of 
the new age, not the joy of the renascent world, not 
the petulant and pulsing rapture of youth : these 
had been divided between Lionardo, Raphael, and 
Correggio — but the bitter burden of the sense that 
the awakening to life is in itself a pain, that the 
revelation of the liberated soul is itself judgment, 
that a light is shining, and that the world will not 
comprehend it. Pregnant as are the paintings oi 



346 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

Michael Angelo with religious import, they are no 
longer Catholic in the sense in which the frescoes of 
the Lorenzetti and Orcagna and Giotto are Catholic. 
He went beyond the ecclesiastical standing-ground 
and reached one where philosophy includes the 
Christian faith. Thus the true spirit of the Renais- 
sance was embodied in his work of art. 

Among the multitudes of figures covering the 
wall above the altar in the Sistine Chapel there is 
one that might well stand for a symbol of the Re- 
naissance. It is a woman of gigantic stature in the 
act of toihng upward from the tomb. Grave-clothes 
impede the motion of her body : they shroud her 
eyes ^d gather round her chest. Part only of her 
face and throat is visible, where may be read a look 
of blank bewilderment and stupefaction, a struggle 
with death's slumber in obedience to some inner 
impulse. Yet she is rising slowly, half awake, and 
scarcely conscious, to await a doom still undeter- 
mined. Thus Michael Angelo interpreted the mean- 
ing of his age. 



CHAPTER VII. 

VENETIAN PAINTING. 

Painting bloomed late in Venice — Conditions offered by Venice to 
Art — Shelley and Pietro Aretino — Political circumstances of 
Venice — Comparison with Florence — The Ducal Palace — Art re- 
garded as an adjunct to State Pageantry — Myth of Venezia— 
Heroic Deeds of Venice — Tintoretto's Paradise and Guardi's Pic- 
ture of a Ball — Early Venetian Masters of Murano — Gian Bellini — 
Carpaccio's little Angels — The Madonna of S. Zaccaria — Giorgione 
— Allegory, Idyl, Expression of Emotion — ^The Monk at the Clavi- 
chord — Titian, Tintoret, and Veronese — Tintoretto's attempt to 
dramatize Venetian Art — Veronese's Mundane Splendor — Titian '5» 
Sophoclean Harmony — Their Schools — Further characteristics of 
Veronese — of Tintoretto — His Imaginative Energy — Predominant 
Poetry — Titian's Perfection of Balance — Assumption of Madonna 
— Spirit common to the Great Venetians. 

It was a fact of the greatest importance for the 
development of the fine arts in Italy that painting 
in Venice reached maturity later than in Florence. 
Owing to this circumstance one chief aspect of the 
Renaissance, its material magnificence and freedom, 
received consummate treatment at the hands of 
Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese. To idealize the 
sensualities of the external universe, to achieve for 
color what the Florentines had done for form, to 
invest the worldly grandeur of human life at one of 
its most gorgeous epochs with the dignity of the 



348 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

highest art, was what these great artists were called 
on to accomplish. Their task could not have been 
so worthily performed in the fifteenth century as in 
the sixteenth, if the development of the aesthetic sense 
had been more premature among the Venetians. 

Venice was precisely fitted for the part her 
painters had to play. Free, isolated, wealthy, 
powerful ; famous throughout Europe for the pomp 
of her state equipage, and for the immorality of her 
private manners; ruled by a prudent aristocracy, 
who spent vast wealth on public shows and on the 
maintenance of a more than imperial civic majesty : 
Venice, with her pavement of liquid chrysoprase, 
with her palaces of porphyry and marble, her fres- 
coed fagades, her quays and squares aglow with the 
costumes of the Levant, her lagoons afloat with the 
galleys of all nations, her churches floored with 
mosaics, her silvery domes and ceilings glittering with 
sculpture bathed in molten gold : Venice luxurious 
in the light and color of a vaporous atmosphere, 
where sea-mists rose into the mounded summer 
clouds; arched over by the broad expanse of sky, 
bounded only by the horizon of waves and plain and 
distant mountain ranges, and reflected in all its 
many hues of sunrise and sunset upon the glassy 
surface of smooth waters : Venice asleep like a mira- 
cle of opal or of pearl upon the bosom of an undu- 
lating lake — here and here only on the face of the 



NATURE IN VENICE. 349 

whole globe was the unique city wherein the pride 
of life might combine with the luster of the physical 
universe to create and stimulate in the artist a sense 
of all that was most sumptuous in the pageant of 
the world of sense. 

There is color in flowers. Gardens of tulips are 
radiant, and mountain valleys touch the soul with 
the beauty of their pure and gem-like hues. There- 
fore the painters of Flanders and of Umbria, John 
van Eyck and Gentile da Fabriano, penetrated some 
of the secrets of the world of color. But what 
are the purples and scarlets and blues of iris, ane- 
mone, or columbine, dispersed among deep meadow 
grasses or trained in quiet cloister garden-beds, 
when compared with that melodrama of flame and 
gold and rose and orange and azure which the skies 
and lagoons of Venice yield almost daily to the 
eyes? The Venetians had no green fields and 
trees, no garden borders, no blossoming orchards, 
to teach them the tender suggestiveness, the quaint 
poetry of isolated or contrasted tints. Their mea- 
dows were the fruitless furrows of the Adriatic, hued 
like a peacock's neck ; they called the pearl-shells of 
their Lido flowers ^or di mare. Nothing distracted 
their attention from the glories of morning and of 
evening presented to them by their sea and sky. It 
was in consequence of this that the Venetians con- 
ceived color heroically, not as a matter of missal- 



350 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY, 

margins or of subordinate decoration, but as a motive 
worthy in itself of sublime treatment. In like man- 
ner, hedged in by no limitary hills, contracted by no 
city walls, stifled by no narrow streets, but open to 
the liberal airs of heaven and ocean, the Venetians 
understood space and imagined pictures almost 
boundless in their immensity. Light, color, air, 
space : those are the elemental conditions of Vene- 
tian art ; of those the painters weaved their ideal 
world for beautiful and proud humanity. 

Shelley's description of a Venetian sunset strikes 
the key-note to Venetian painting:^ 

As those who pause on some delightful way. 
Though bent on pleasant pilgrimage, we stood 
Looking upon the evening and the flood 
Which lay between the city and the shore, 
Paved with the image of the sky : the hoar 
And airy Alps toward the north appeared, 
Through mist, a heaven-sustaining bulwark, reared 
Between the east and west ; and half the sky 
. Was roofed with clouds of rich emblazonry. 
Dark purple at the zenith, which still grew 
Down the steep west into a wondrous hue 
Brighter than burning gold, even to the rent 
Where the swift sun yet paused in his descent 
Among the many-folded hills — they were 
Those famous Euganean hills, which bear, 



* From the beginning of 'Julian and Maddalo,' which relates a 
ride taken by Shelley with Lord Byron on the Lido, and their visit to 
the madhouse on its neighboring island. The description, richl) 
colored and somewhat confused in detail, seems to me peculiarly 
true to Venetian scenery. With the exception of Tunis, I know of no 
Buch theater for sunset shows as Venice. Tunis has the same ele- 
ments of broad lagoons and distant hills, but not the same vaporous 
atmosphere. 



VENETIAN SUNSETS. 351 

As seen from Lido through the harbor piles, 

The likeness of a clump of peaked isles — 

And then, as if the earth and sea had been 

Dissolved into one lake of fire, were seen 

Those mountains towering, as from waves of flame, 

Around the vaporous sun, from which there came 

The inmost purple spirit of light, and made 

Their very peaks transparent. * Ere it fade,* 

Said my companion, * I will show you soon 

A better station.' So, o'er the lagune 

We glided : and from that funereal bark 

I leaned, and saw the city ; and could mark 

How from their many isles, in evening's gleam. 

Its temples and its palaces did seem 

Like fabrics of enchantment piled to heaven. 

With this we may compare the following extract 
from a letter addressed in May, 1544, to Titian by 
one of the most unprincipled of literary bandits who 
have ever disgraced humanity, but who nevertheless 
was solemnized to the spirit of true poetry by the 
grandiose aspect of nature as it appeared to him in 
Venice. That Pietro Aretino should have so deeply 
felt the charm of natural beauty in an age when even 
the greatest artists and poets sought inspiration in 
human life rather than the outer world, is a signifi- 
cant fact. It seems to illustrate the necessity where- 
by Venice became the cradle of the art of nature.^ 
' Having, dear sir, and my best gossip, supped alone 
to the injury of my custom, or, to speak more truly, 
supped in the company of all the boredoms of a cursed 

* * Lettere di Messer Pietro Aretino,' Parigi, MDCIX, lib. iii. p. 48. 
I have made a paraphrase rather than a translation of this rare and 
curious description. 



352 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY, 

quartan fever, hich will not let me taste the flavoi 
of any food, 1 rose from table sated with the same 
disgust with whidi I had sat down to it. In this 
mood I went and leaned my arms upon the sill out- 
side my window, and throwing my chest and nearly 
all my body on the marble, abandoned myself to the 
contemplation of the spectacle presented by the in- 
numerable boats, filled with foreigners as well as 
people of the city, which gave delight not merely to 
the gazers, but also to the Grand Canal itself, that 
perpetual delight of all who plow its waters. From 
this animated scene, all of a sudden, like one who 
from mere ennui knows not how to occupy his mind, 
I turned my eyes to heaven, which, from the moment 
when God made it, was never adorned with such 
painted loveliness of lights and shadows. The whole 
region of the air was what those who envy you, 
because they are unable to be you, would fain express. 
To begin with, the buildings of Venice, though of 
solid stone, seemed made of some ethereal substance. 
Then the sky was full of variety — here clear and 
ardent, there dulled and overclouded. What mar- 
velous clouds they were ! Masses of them in the 
center of the scene hung above the house-roofs, 
while the immediate part was formed of a gray tint 
inclining to dark. I gazed astonished at the varied 
colors they displayed. The nearer masses burned 
with flames of sunset : the more remote blushed with 



POLITICAL CONDITIONS OF VENICE. 353 

a blaze of crimson less afire. Oh, how splendidly did 
Nature's pencil treat and dispose that airy landscape, 
keeping the sky apart from the palaces, just as 
Titian does ! On one side the heavens showed a 
greenish-blue, on another a bluish-green, invented 
verily by the caprice of Nature, who is mistress of 
the greatest masters. With her lights and her darks, 
there she was harmonizing, toning, and bringing out 
into relief, just as she wished. Seeing which, I, who 
know that your pencil is the spirit of her inmost 
soul, cried aloud thrice or four times, " Oh, Titian ! 
where are you now ? " * 

In order to understand the destiny of Venice in 
art, it is not enough to concentrate attention on the 
peculiarities of her physical environment. Potent 
as these were in the creation of her style, the politi- 
cal and social conditions of the Republic require 
also to be taken into account. Among Italian cities 
Venice was unique. She alone was tranquil in her 
empire, unimpeded in her constitutional develop- 
ment, independent of Church interference, undis- 
turbed by the cross-purposes and intrigues of the 
despots, inhabited by merchants who were princes, 
and by a free-born people who had never seen 
war at their gates. The serenity of undisturbed 
security, the luxury of wealth amassed abroad and 
liberally spent at home, gave a physiognomy of ease 
and proud self-confidence to all her edifices. The 



354 RENAISSANCE IN ITAL Y. 

grim and anxious struggles of the Middle Ages left 
no mark on Venice. How different was this town 
from Florence, every inch of whose domain could tell 
of civic warfare, whose passionate aspirations after 
independence ended in the despotism of the bour- 
geois Medici, whose repeated revolutions had slavery 
for their climax, whose gray palaces bore on their 
fronts the stamp of mediaeval vigilance, whose spirit 
was incarnated in Dante the exile, whose enslave- 
ment forced from Michael Angelo those groans of 
a chained Titan expressed in the marbles of S. 
Lorenzo ! It is not an insignificant, though a slight, 
detail, that the predominant color of Florence is 
brown, while the predominant color of Venice is 
that of mother-of-pearl, concealing within its general 
whiteness every tint that can be placed upon the 
palette of a painter. The conditions of Florence 
stimulated mental energy and turned the forces of 
the soul inward. Those of Venice inclined the 
individual to accept life as he found it. Instead of 
exciting him to think, they disposed him to enjoy, or 
to acquire by industry the means of manifold enjoy- 
ment. To represent in art the intellectual strivings 
of the Renaissance was the task of Florence and her 
sons ; to create a monument of Renaissance mag- 
nificence was the task of Venice. Without Venice 
the modern world could not have produced that 
flower of sensuous and unreflective loveliness in 



THE DUCAL PALACE, 355 

painting which is worthy to stand beside the highest 
product of the Greek genius in sculpture. For 
Athena from her Parthenon stretches the hand to 
Venezia enthroned in the ducal palace. The broad 
brows and earnest eyes of the Hellenic goddess are 
of one divine birth and lineage with the golden hair 
and superb carriage of the sea-queen. 

It is in the heart of Venice, in the House of the 
Republic, that the Venetian painters, considered as 
the interpreters of worldly splendor, fulfilled their 
function with the most complete success. Centuries 
contributed to make the ducal palace what it is. 
The massive colonnades and Gothic loggias of the 
external basement date from the thirteenth century ; 
their sculpture belongs to the age when Niccola 
Pisano's genius was in the ascendant. The square 
fabric of the palace, so beautiful in the irregularity of 
its pointed windows, so singular in its mosaic diaper 
of pink and white, was designed at the same early 
period. The inner court and the fagade that over- 
hangs the lateral canal display the handiwork of 
Sansovino. The halls of the palace — spacious 
chambers where the Senate assembled, where am- 
bassadors approached the Doge, where the Savi 
deliberated, where the Council of Ten conducted 
their inquisition — are walled and roofed with pictures 
of inestimable value, encased in framework of carved 
oak, overlaid with burnished gold. Supreme art — 



356 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY, 

the art of the imagination perfected with delicate 
and skillful care in detail — is made in these proud 
halls the minister of mundane pomp. In order that 
the gold brocade of the ducal robes, that the scarlet 
and crimson of the Venetian senator, might be duly 
harmonized by the richness of their surroundings, it 
was necessary that canvases measured by the square 
yard, and rendered priceless by the authentic handi- 
work of Titian, Tintoret, and Veronese, should glow 
upon the walls and ceilings. A more insolent dis- 
play of public wealth — a more lavish outpouring of 
human genius in the service of State pageantry, 
can not be imagined. 

Sublime over all allegories and histories depicted 
in those multitudes of paintings sits Venezia her- 
self enthroned and crowned, the personification of 
haughtiness and power. Figured as a regal lady, 
with yellow hair tightly knotted round a small head 
poised upon her upright throat and ample shoulders, 
Venice takes her chair of sovereignty — as mistress 
of the ocean to whom Neptune and the Tritons offer 
pearls, as empress of the globe at whose footstool 
wait Justice with the sword and Peace with the 
olive-branch, as a queen of heaven exalted to the 
clouds. They have made her a goddess, those great 
painters; they have produced a mythus, and per- 
sonified in native loveliness that bride of the sea, 
the^r love, their lady. The beauty of Venetian 



VENETIAN PIETY, 357 

women and the glory of Venetian empire find their 
meeting-point in her, and live as the spirit of Athens 
lived in Pallas Promachos. On every side, above, 
around, wherever the eye falls in those vast rooms, 
are seen the deeds of Venice — painted histories ot 
her triumphs over emperors and popes and infidels, 
or allegories of her greatness — scenes wherein the 
Doges perform acts of faith, with S. Mark for theii 
protector, and with Venezia for their patroness. The 
saints in Paradise, massed together by Tintoretto 
and by Palma, mingle with mythologies of Greece 
and Rome and episodes of pure idyllic painting. 

Religion in these pictures was a matter of parade, 
an adjunct to the costly public life of the Republic. 
We need not, therefore, conclude that it was unreal. 
Such as it was, the religion of the Venetian masters 
is indeed as genuine as that of Fra Angelico or 
Albert Dtirer. But it was the faith not of humble 
men or of mystics, not of profound thinkers or ec- 
static visionaries, so much as of cpurtiers and states- 
men, of senators and merchants, for whom religion 
was a function among other functions, not a thing 
apart, not a source of separate and supreme vitality. 
Even as Christians, the Venetians lived a life sepa- 
rate from the rest of Italy. Their Church claimea 
independence of the see of Rome, and the enthu- 
siasm of S. Francis was but faintly felt in the lagooub. 
Siena in her hour of need dedicated herself to Ma- 



3S8 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY, 

donna; Florence in the hour of her regeneration 
gave herself to Christ ; Venice remained under the 
ensign of the leonine S. Mark. While the cities of 
Lombardy and Central Italy ran wild with revivalism 
and religious panics, the Venetians maintained their 
calm, and never suffered piety to exceed the limits 
of political prudence. There is, therefore, no mys- 
tical exultation in the faith depicted by her artists. 
That Tintoretto could have painted the saints in 
glory — a countless multitude of congregated forms, 
a sea whereof the waves are souls — as a background 
for State ceremony, shows the positive and realistic 
attitude of mind from which the most imaginative of 
Venetian masters started when he undertook the 
most exalted of religious themes. Paradise is a fact, 
we may fancy Tintoretto reasoned ; and it is easier 
to fill a quarter of an acre of canvas with a picture of 
Paradise than with any other subject, because the 
figures can be arranged in concentric tiers round 
Christ and Madonna in glory. 

There is a little sketch by Guardi represent- 
ing a masked ball in the Council Chamber where 
the Paradise of Tintoretto fills a wall. The men 
are in periwigs and long waistcoats; the ladies 
wear hoops, patches, fans, high heels, and powder. 
Bowing, promenading, intriguing, exchanging com- 
pliments or repartees, they move from point to 
point ; while from the billowy surge of saints, 



MY THUS OF VRNEZIA, 359 

Moses with the table of the law and the Mag- 
dalen with her adoring eyes of penitence look 
down upon them, Tintoretto could not but have 
foreseen that the world of living pettiness and 
passion would perpetually jostle with his world 
of painted sublimities and sanctities in that vast 
hall. Yet he did not on that account shrink from 
the task or fail in its accomplishment Paradise 
existed : therefore it could be painted ; and he was 
called upon to paint it here. If the fine gentle- 
men and ladies below felt out of harmony with the 
celestial host, so much the worse for them. In this 
practical spirit the Venetian masters approached 
religious art, and such was the sphere appointed for 
it in the pageantry of the Republic. When Paolo 
Veronese was examined by the Holy Office respect- 
ing some supposed irreverence in a sacred picture, 
his answers clearly proved that in planning it he had 
thought less of its spiritual significance than of its 
aesthetic effect.^ 

In the ducal palace the Venetian art of the 
Renaissance culminates ; and here we might pause 
a moment to consider the difference between these 
paintings and the mediaeval frescoes of the Palazzo 
Pubblico at Siena.^ The Sienese painters conse- 
crated all their abilities to the expression of thoughts, 
theories of political self-government in a free state. 

^ See Yriarte, * Un Patricien de Venise,' p. 439. 
" See above, p. 210, 



36o RENAISSANCE IN ITALY, 

and devotional ideas. The citizen who read the 
lesson of the Sala della Pace was instructed in his 
duties to God and to the State. The Venetian 
painters, as we have seen, exalted Venice and set 
forth her acts of power. Their work is a glorifica- 
tion of the Republic ; but no doctrine is inculcated, 
and no system of thought is conveyed to the mind 
through the eye. Daily pacing the saloons of the 
palace, Doge and noble were reminded of the great- 
ness of the state they represented. They were not 
invited to reflect upon the duties of the governor 
and governed. Their imaginations were dilated 
and their pride roused by the spectacle of Venice 
seated like a goddess in her home. Of all the 
secular states of Italy the Republic of S. Mark's 
alone produced this mythical ideal of the body 
politic, self-sustained and independent of the citi- 
zens, compelling their allegiance, and sustaining 
them through generations with the life of its or- 
ganic unity .^ The artists had no reason to paint 
thoughts and theories. It was enough to set forth 
Venice and to illustrate her acts. 

Long before Venetian painting reached a climax 
in the decorative triumphs of the ducal palace, the 
masters of the school had formed a style expressive 
of the spirit of the Renaissance, considered as the 
spirit of free enjoyment and living energy. To 

* See ' Age of the Despots,' p. 215. 



THE VIVARINL 361 

trace the history of Venetian painting is to follow 
through its several stages the growth of that mastery 
over color and sensuous beauty which was per- 
fected in the works of Titian and his contempora- 
ries.^ Under the Vivarini of Murano the Venetian 
school in its infancy began with a selection from 
the natural world of all that struck them as most 
brilliant. No other painters of their age in Italy 
employed such glowing colors or showed a more 
marked predilection for the imitation of fruits, rich 
stuffs, architectural canopies, jewels, and landscape 
backgrounds. Their piety, unlike the mysticism of 
the Sienese and the deep thought of the Florentine 
masters, is somewhat superficial and conventional. 
The merit of their devotional pictures consists of 
simplicity, vivacity, and joyousness. Our Lady and 
her court of saints seem living and breathing upon 
earth. There is no atmosphere of tranced solem 
nity surrounding them, like that which gives pc- 
culiar meaning to similar works of the Van Eycks 
and Memling — artists, by the way, who in many 
important respects are more nearly allied than any 

* I must refer my readers to Crowe and Cavalcaselle for an esti- 
mate of the influence exercised at Venice by Gentile de Fabriano, John 
Alamannus, and the school of Squarcione. Antonello da Messina 
brought his method of oil-painting into the city in 1470, and Gian 
Bellini learned something at Padua from Andrea Mantegna. The 
true point about Venice, however, is that the Venetian character 
absorbed, assimilated, and converted to its own originality whatever 
touched it. 



362 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY, 

Others to the spirit of the first age of Venetian 
painting.^ 

What the Vivarini began the three Bellini,^ 
with Crivelli, Carpaccio, Mansueti, Basaiti, Catena, 
Cima da Conegliano, Bissolo, Cordegliaghi, con- 
tinued. Bright costumes, distinct and sunny land- 
scapes, broad backgrounds of architecture, large 
skies, polished armor, gilded cornices, young faces 
of fisher-boys and country girls,^ grave faces of 
old men brown with sea-wind and sunlight, withered 
faces of women hearty in a hale old age, the strong 
manhood of Venetian senators, the dignity of pa- 
trician ladies, the gracefulness of children, the rosy 
whiteness and amber-colored tresses of the daugh- 
ters of the Adriatic and lagoons — these are the 
source of inspiration to the Venetians of the second 
period. Mantegna, a few miles distant, at Padua, 
was working out his ideal of severely classical de- 
sign. Yet he scarcely touched the manner of the 
Venetians with his influence, though Gian Bellini 
was his brother-in-law and pupil, and though his 
genius, in grasp of matter and in management of 

* The conditions of art in Flanders — wealthy, bourgeois, proud, 
free — were not dissimilar to those of art in Venice. The misty flats of 
Belgium have some of the atmospheric qualities of Venice. As Van 
Eyck is to the Vivarini, so is Rubens to Paolo Veronese. This 
expresses the amount of likeness and of difference. 

"^ Jacopo and his sons Gentile and Giovanni. 

^ Notice particularly the Contadina type of S. Catherine in a pic- 
ture ascribed to Cordegliaghi in the Venetian Academy. 



VENETIAN REALISM, 363 

composition, soared above his neighbors. Lio- 
nardo da Vinci at Milan was perfecting his prob- 
lems of psychology in painting, offering to the 
world solutions of the greatest difficulties in the 
delineation of the spirit by expression. Yet not 
a trace of Lionardo's subtle play of light and 
shadow upon thoughtful features can be discerned 
in the work of the Bellini. For them the mysteries 
of the inner and the outer world had no attraction. 
The externals of a full and vivid existence fasci- 
nated their imagination. Their poetry and their 
piety were alike simple and objective. How to 
depict the world as it is seen — a miracle of varying 
lights and melting hues, a pageant substantial to 
the touch and concrete to the eyes, a combination 
of forms defined by colors more than outlines — 
was their task. They did not reach their end by 
anatomy, analysis, and reconstruction. They under- 
took to paint just what they felt and saw. 

Very instructive are the wall-pictures of this 
period, painted not in fresco but on canvas by Car- 
paccio and Gentile Bellini, for the decoration of 
the Scuole of S. Ursula and S. Croce.^ Not only 
do these bring before us the life of Venice in its 
manifold reality, but they illustrate the tendency 
of the Venetian masters to express the actual world, 

* These Scuole were the halls of meeting for companies called by 
the names of patron saints. 



364 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

rather than to formulate an ideal of the fancy or 
to search the secrets of the soul. This realism, 
if the name can be applied to pictures so poetical 
as those of Carpaccio, is not, like the Florentine 
realism, hard and scientific. A natural feeling for 
grace and a sense of romance inspire the artist, 
and breathe from every figure that he paints. The 
type of beauty produced is charming by its negli- 
gence and naivete; it is not thought out with 
pains or toilsomely elaborated.* 

Among the loveliest motives used in the altar- 
pieces of this period might be mentioned the boy- 
angels playing flutes and mandolines beneath Ma- 
donna on the steps of her throne. There are 
usually three of them, seated or sometimes stand- 
ing. They hold their instruments of music as 
though they had just ceased from singing and 
were ready to recommence at the pleasure of their 
mistress. Meanwhile there is a silence in the celes- 
tial company, through which the still voice of the 
praying heart is heard, a silence corresponding to 
the hushed mood of the worshiper.^ The children 

* Notice in particular, from the series of pictures illustrating the 
legend of S. Ursula, the very beautiful faces and figures of the saint 
herself and her young bridegroom, the Prince of Britain. Attendant 
squires and pages in these paintings have all the charm of similar 
subordinate personages in Pinturiccliio, with none of his affectation. 

" The most beautiful of these angiolini, with long flakes of flaxen 
hair falling from their foreheads, are in a Sacra Conversazione of Car- 
paccio's in the Academy. Gian Bellini's, in many similar pictures, are 
of the same delicacy. 



GIAN BELLINI, 365 

are accustomed to the holy place ; therefore their 
attitudes are both reverent and natural. They are 
more earthly than Fra Angelico's melodists, and 
yet they are not precisely of human lineage. It is 
not, perhaps, too much to say that they strike the 
keynote of Venetian devotion, at once real and 
devoid of pietistic rapture. 

Gian Bellini brought the art of this second 
period to completion. In his sacred pictures the 
reverential spirit of early Italian painting is com- 
bined with a feeling for color and a dexterity in 
its manipulation pecuHar to Venice. Bellini can not 
be called a master of the full Renaissance. He 
falls into the same class as Francia and Perugino, 
who adhered to quattrocento modes of thought 
and sentiment, while attaining at isolated points 
to the freedom of the Renaissance. In him the 
colorists of the next age found an absolute 
teacher ; no one has surpassed him in the difficult 
art of giving tone to pure tints in combination. 
There is a picture of Bellini*s in S. Zaccaria at 
Venice — Madonna enthroned with Saints — where 
the skill of the colorist may be said to culminate 
in unsurpassable perfection. The whole painting 
is bathed in a soft but luminous haze of gold ; yet 
each figure has its individuality of treatment, the 
glowing fire of S. Peter contrasting with the pearly 
coolness of the drapery and flesh-tints of the Mag- 



366 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY, 

dalen. No brush-vvoik is perceptible. Surface 
and substance have been elaborated into one har- 
monious richness that defies analysis. Between 
this picture, so strong in its smoothness, and any 
masterpiece of Velasquez, so rugged in its strength, 
what a wide abyss of inadequate half-achievement, 
of smooth feebleness and feeble ruggedness exists ! 

Giorgione, did we but possess enough of his 
authentic works to judge by, would be found the first 
painter of the true Renaissance among the Vene- 
tians, the inaugurator of the third and great period.^ 
He died at the age of thirty-six, the inheritor of 
unfulfilled renown. Time has destroyed the last 
vestige of his frescoes. Criticism has reduced the 
number of his genuine easel-pictures to half a dozen. 
He exists as a great name. The part he played in 
the development of Venetian art was similar to that 
of Marlowe in the history of our drama. He first 
cut painting altogether adrift from mediaeval moor- 
ings, and launched it on the waves of the Renais- 
sance liberty. While equal as a colorist to Bellini, 
though in a different and more sensuous region, 
Giorgione, by the variety and inventiveness of his 
conception, proved himself a painter of the caliber of 
Titian. Sacred subjects he seems to have but rarely 
treated, unless such purely idyllic pictures as the 

* What follows above about Giorgione is advanced with diffidence, 
since the name of no other great painter has been so freely used to 
cover the works of his inferiors. 



GIORGIONE. 367 

Finding of Moses in the Uffizzi, and the Meeting of 
Jacob and Rachel at Dresden, deserve the name. 
Allegories of deep and problematic meaning, the 
key whereof has to be found in states of the emotion 
rather than in thoughts, delighted him. He may be 
said to have invented the Venetian species of ro- 
mance-picture, where an episode in a novella forms 
the motive of the painting.^ Nor was he deficient 
in tragic power, as the tremendous study for a Lu- 
crece in the Uffizzi collection sufficiently proves. 
In his drawings he models the form without outline 
by massive distribution of light and dark. In style 
they are the very opposite of Lionardo's clearly- 
defined studies touched with the metal point upon 
prepared paper. They suggest coloring, and are 
indeed the designs of a great colorist, who saw 
things under the conditions of their tints and tone. 

Of the undisputed pictures by Giorgione, the 
grandest is the Monk at the Clavichord, in the Pitti 
Palace at Florence.^ The young man has his fingers 

^ Lord Lansdowne's Giorgionesque picture of a young man crowned 
with vine playing and singing to two girls in a garden, for example. 
The celebrated Concert of the Louvre Gallery, so charming for its land- 
scape and so voluptuous in its dreamy sense of Arcadian luxury, is 
given by Crowe and Cavalcaselle to an imitator of Sebastian del 
Piombo. See 'History of Painting in North Italy,' vol. ii. p. 147. 

' Under the fire of Crowe and Cavalcaselle's destructive criticism 
it would require more real courage than I possess to speak of the ' En- 
tombment ' in the Monte di Pieta at Treviso as genuine. Coarse and 
unselect as are the types of the boy angels, as well as of the young 
athletic giant who plays the part in it of the dead Christ, this is a 



368 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY, 

on the keys ; he is modulating in a mood of grave and 
sustained emotion ; his head is turned away toward 
an old man standing near him. On the other side of 
the instrument is a boy. These two figures are but 
foils and adjuncts to the musician in the middle ; and 
the whole interest of his face lies in its concentrated 
feeling — the very soul of music, as expressed in Mr. 
Robert Browning's Abt Vogler, passing through his 
eyes. This power of painting the portrait of an 
emotion, of depicting by the features a deep and 
powerful but tranquil moment of the inner life, must 
have been possessed by Giorgione in an eminent 
degree. We find it again in the so-called Begriis- 
sung of the Dresden Gallery.^ The picture is a 
large landscape. Jacob and Rachel meet and salute 
each other with a kiss. But the shepherd lying 
beneath the shadow of a chestnut-tree beside a well 
has a whole Arcadia of intense yearning in the eyes 
of sympathy he fixes on the lovers. Something of 
this faculty, it may be said in passing, descended to 
Bonifazio, whose romance pictures are among the 
most charming products of Venetian art, and one of 

truly grandiose and striking picture. Nothing proves the average great- 
ness of the Venetian masters more than the possibility of attributing 
such compositions to obscure and subordinate craftsmen of the school. 
* Crowe and Cavalcaselle assign this picture with some confidence, 
and with fair show of reason, to Cariani, on whom again they father 
the frescoes at Colleoni's Castle of Malpaga. I have ventured to 
notice it above in connection with Giorgione, since it exhibits some of 
the most striking Giorgionesque qualities, and shows the ascendency of 
bis imagination over the Venetian School. 



TITIAN, TIN TO RET, AND VERONESE. 369 

whose singing women in the feast of Dives has the 
Giorgionesque fullness of inner feeling. 

Fate has dealt less unkindly with Titian, Tin- 
toret, and Veronese than with Giorgione. The works 
of these artists, in whom the Venetian Renaissance 
attained completion, have been preserved in large 
numbers and in excellent condition. Chronologically 
speaking, Titian, the contemporary of Giorgione, 
precedes Tintoretto, and Tintoretto is somewhat 
earlier than Veronese.^ But for the purpose of criti- 
cism the three painters may be considered together 
as the representatives of three marked aspects in the 
fully-developed Venetian style. 

Tintoretto, called by the Italians the thunder- 
bolt of painting, because of his vehement impulsive- 
ness and rapidity of execution, soars above his 
brethren by the faculty of pure imagination. It was 
he who brought to its perfection the poetry of chiar- 
oscuro, expressing moods of passion and emotion 
by brusque lights, luminous half-shadows, and semi- 
opaque darkness, no less unmistakably than Bee- 
thoven by symphonic modulations. H e too engrafted 
on the calm and natural Venetian manner something 
of the Michael Angelesque sublimity, and sought 
to vary by dramatic movement the romantic motives 
of his school. In his work, more than in that of his 

* Giorgione, b. 1478 ; d. 151 1. Titian, b. 1477 ; d. 1576. Tinto- 
retto, b. 1 51 2; d. 1594. Veronese, b. 1530; d. 1588. 



370 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

contemporaries, Venetian art ceased to be decorative 
and idyllic. 

Veronese elevated pageantry to the height of 
serious art. His domain is noonday sunlight ablaze 
on sumptuous dresses and Palladian architecture. 
Where Tintoretto is dramatic he is scenic. Titian, 
in a wise harmony, without either the ^schylean 
fury of Tintoretto or the material gorgeousness of 
Veronese, realized an ideal of pure beauty. Con- 
tinuing the traditions of Bellini and Giorgione, with 
a breadth of treatment and a vigor of well-balanced 
faculties peculiar to himself, Titian gave to color in 
landscape and the human form a sublime yet sensu- 
ous poetry no other painter in the world has reached. 

Tintoretto and Veronese are, both of them, 
excessive. The imagination of Tintoretto is too 
passionate and daring; it scathes and blinds like 
lightning. The sense of splendor in Veronese 
is overpoweringly pompous. Titian's exquisite hu- 
manity, his large and sane nature, gives proper 
value to the imaginative and the scenic elements 
of the Venetian style, without exaggerating either. 
In his masterpieces thought, color, sentiment, and 
composition — the spiritual and technical elements 
of art — exist in perfect balance ; one harmonious 
tone is given to all the parts of his production, 
nor can it be said that any quality asserts itself 
to the injury of the rest. Titian, the Sophocles of 



SECONDARY MASTERS. 371 

painting, has infused into his pictures the spirit of 
music, the Dorian mood of flutes and soft recorders, 
making power incarnate in a form of grace. 

Round these great men are grouped a host of 
secondary but distinguished painters — Palma with 
his golden-haired, large-bosomed sirens ; idyllic Boni- 
fazio ; dramatic Pordenone, whose frescoes are all 
motion and excitement ; Paris Bordone, who mingled 
on his canvas cream and mulberry-juice and sun- 
beams ; the Robusti, the Caliari, the Bassani, and 
others whom it would be tedious to mention. One 
breath, one afflatus, inspired them all ; and it is 
due to this coherence in their style and inspiration 
that the school of Venice, taken as a whole, can 
show more masterpieces by artists of the second 
class than any other in Italy. Superior or inferior 
as they may relatively be among themselves, each 
bears the indubitable stamp of the Venetian Re- 
naissance, and produces work of a quality that 
raises him to high rank among the painters of the 
world. In the same way the spirit of the Renais- 
sance, passing over the dramatists of our Elizabethan 
age, enabled intellects of average force to take rank 
in the company of the noblest. Ford, Massinger, 
Heywood, Decker, Webster, Fletcher, Tourneur, 
Marston, are seated round the throne at the feet of 
Shakspere, Marlowe, and Jonson. 

In order to penetrate the characteristics of Vene- 



372 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

tian art more thoroughly, it will be needful to 
enter into detailed criticism of the three chief mas- 
ters who command the school. To begin with 
Veronese. His canvases are nearly always large — 
filled with figures of the size of life, massed together 
in groups or extended in long lines beneath white 
marble colonnades, which inclose spaces of clear sky 
and silvery clouds. Armor, shot silks and satins, 
brocaded canopies, banners, plate, fruit, scepters, 
crowns, all things, in fact, that burn and glitter in the 
sun, form the habitual furniture of his pictures. 
Rearing horses, dogs, dwarfs, cats, when occasion 
serves, are used to add reality, vivacity, grotesque- 
ness to his scenes. His men and women are large, 
well proportioned, vigorous — eminent for pose and 
gesture rather than for grace or loveliness — distin- 
guished by adult more than adolescent qualities. 

Veronese has no choice type of beauty for 
either sex. We find in him, on the contrary, a some- 
what coarse display of animal force in men, and of 
superb voluptuousness in women. He prefers to paint 
women draped in gorgeous raiment, as if he had 
not felt the beauty of the nude. Their faces are too 
frequently unrefined and empty of expression. His 
noblest creatures are men of about twenty-five, 
manly, brawny, crisp-haired, full of nerve and blood. 
In all this Veronese resembles Rubens. But he 
does not, like Rubens, strike us as gross, sensual, 



WORLDLY POMP OF VERONESE, 373 

fleshly ; ^ he remains proud, powerful, and frigidly 
materiahstic. He raises neither repulsion nor desire, 
but displays with the calm strength of art the empire 
of the mundane spirit. All the equipage of wealth 
and worldliness, the lust of the eye, and the pride of 
hfe — such vision as the fiend offered to Christ on the 
mountain of temptation ; this is Veronese's realm. 
Again, he has no flashes of poetic imagination like 
Tintoretto ; but his grip on the realities of the 
world, his faculty for idealizing prosaic magnificence, 
is even greater. 

Veronese was precisely the painter suited to 
a nation of merchants, in whom the associations 
of the counting-house and the exchange mingled 
with the responsibilities of the Senate and the 
passions of princes. He never portrayed vehe- 
ment emotions. There are no brusque movements, 
no extended arms, Hke those of Tintoretto's Mag- 
dalen in the Pieta at Milan, in his pictures. His 
Christs and Marys and martyrs of all sorts are com- 
posed, serious, courtly, well-fed personages, who, 
like people of the world accidentally overtaken by 
some tragic misfortune, do not stoop to distortions or 
express more than a grave surprise, a decorous sense 
of pain.^ His angelic beings are equally earthly. 

^ I can not, for example, imagine Veronese painting any thing like 
Rubens* two pictures of the * Last Judgment ' at Munich. 

' For his sacred types see the ' Marriage at Cana ' in tlie Louvre, 
the little 'Crucifixion' and the 'Baptism' of the Pitti, and the 'Mar- 
tyrdom of S. Agata ' in the Uffizzi. 



374 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

The Venetian Rothschilds no doubt preferred 
the ceremonial to the imaginative treatment ot 
sacred themes; and to do him justice, Veronese 
did not make what would in his case have been the 
mistake of choosing the tragedies of the Bible for 
representation. It is the story of Esther, with its 
royal audiences, coronations, and processions ; the 
marriage-feast at Cana ; the banquet in the house of 
Levi, that he selects by preference. Even these 
themes he removes into a region far from biblical 
associations. His mzse en seme is invariably borrowed 
from luxurious Italian palaces — large open courts 
and loggie, crowded with guests and lackeys — tables 
profusely laden with gold and silver plate. The 
same love of display led him to delight in allegory — 
not allegory of the deep and mystic kind, but of the 
pompous and processional, in which Venice appears 
enthroned among the deities, or Jupiter fulminates 
against the vices, or the genii of the arts are personi- 
fied as handsome women and blooming boys. In 
dealing with mythology, again, it is not its poetry 
that he touches ; he uses the tale of Europa, for 
example, as the motive for rich toilettes and delight- 
ful landscape, choosing the moment that has least in 
it of pathos. These being the prominent features 
of his style, it remains to be said that what is really 
great in Veronese is the sobriety of his imagination 
and the solidity of his v/orkmanship. Amid so 



TINTORETTO'S IMAGINATIVE ENERGY, 375 

much that is distracting, he never loses command 
over his subject ; nor does he degenerate into fulsome 
rhetoric. 

Tintoretto is not at home in this somewhat vul- 
gar region of ceremonial grandeur. He requires 
both thought and fancy as the stimulus to his 
creative effort. He can not be satisfied with repro- 
ducing, even in the noblest combinations, merely 
what he sees around him of resplendent and magnifi- 
cent. There must be scope for poetry in the con- 
ception and for audacity in the projection of his 
subject, something that shall rouse the prophetic 
faculty and evoke the seer in the artist, or Tintoretto 
does not rise to his own altitude. Accordingly we 
find that, in contrast with Veronese, he selects by 
preference the most tragic and dramatic subjects to 
be found in sacred history. The Crucifixion, with 
its agonizing deity and prostrate groups of women, 
sunk below the grief of tears; the Temptation in 
the wilderness, with its passionate contrast of the 
gray-robed Man of Sorrows and the ruby-winged, 
voluptuous fiend ; the Temptation of Adam in Eden, 
a glowing allegory of the fascination of the spirit by 
the flesh ; Paradise, a tempest of souls, whirled like 
Lucretian atoms or gold dust in sunbeams by the 
celestial forces that perform the movement of the 
spheres ; the Destruction of the world, where all the 
fountains and rivers and lakes and seas of earth 



376 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY, 

have formed one cataract that thunders with cities 
and nations on its rapids down a bottomless gulf, 
while all the winds and hurricanes of the air have 
grown into one blast that carries men like dead 
leaves up to judgment ; the Plague of the fiery ser- 
pents, with multitudes encoiled and writhing on a 
burning waste of sand ; the Massacre of the Inno- 
cents, with its spilth of blood on slippery pavements of 
porphyry and serpentine ; the Delivery of the tables 
of the law to Moses amid clouds on Sinai, a white 
ascetic, lightning-smitten man emerging in the glory 
of apparent godhead ; the anguish of the Magdalen 
above her martyred God; the solemn silence of 
Christ before the throne of Pilate ; the rushing of 
the wings of Seraphim, and the clangor of the 
trumpet that awakes the dead — these are the soul- 
stirring themes that Tintoretto handles with the 
ease of mastery.^ 

Meditating upon Tintoretto^s choice of such 
subjects, we feel that the profoundest characteristic 
of his genius is the determination toward motives 
pre-eminently poetic rather than proper to the 
figurative arts. The poet imagines a situation in 
which the intellectual or emotional life is paramount, 
and the body is subordinate. The painter selects 
situations in which physical form is of the first im- 

* These examples are mostly chosen from the Scuola di S. Rocco 
and the church of S. Maria dell' Orto at Venice; also from 'Pietas,' in 
the Brera and the Pitti, the ' Paradise ' of the Ducal Palace, and a 
sketch for ' Paradise ' in the Louvre, 



SENSE OF BEAUTY, 377 

portance, and a feeling or a thought Is suggested. 
But Tintoretto grapples immediately with poetical 
ideas ; and he oftens fails to realize them fully 
through the inadequacy of painting as a medium for 
such matter. Moses, in the drama of the Golden 
Calf, for instance, is a poem, not a true picture.^ 
The pale ecstatic stretching out emaciated arms 
presents no beauty of attitude or outline. Energy 
of thought is conspicuous in the figure ; and reflec- 
tion is needed to bring out the purpose of the painter.^ 
It is not, however, only in the region of the 
vast, tempestuous, and tragic that Tintoretto finds 
himself at home. He is equal to every task 
that can be imposed upon the imagination. Pro- 
vided only that the spiritual fount be stirred, the 
jet of living water gushes forth, pure, inexhaustible, 
and limpid. In his Marriage of Bacchus and 
Ariadne, that most perfect lyric of the sensuous 
fancy from which sensuality is absent;^ in his 

* S. Maria dell' Orto. 

' What is here said about Tintoretto is also true of Michael 
Angelo. His sculpture in S. Lorenzo, compared with Greek sculpture, 
the norm and canon of the perfect in that art, may be called an inva- 
sion of the realm of poetry or music. 

^ There are probably not few of my readers who, after seeing this 
painting in the Ducal Palace, will agree with me that it is, if not the 
greatest, at any rate the most beautiful oil-picture in existence. In no 
other picture has a poem of feeling and of fancy, a romance of varied 
b'ghts and shades, a symphony of delicately-blended hues, a play of 
attitude and movement transitory but in no sense forced or violent, 
been more successfully expressed by means more simple or with effect 
more satisfying. Something of the mythopoetic faculty must have sur- 
vived in Tintoretto, and enabled him to inspire the Greek tale with 
this intense vitality of beauty* 



378 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY, 

Temptation of Adam, that symphony of gray and 
brown and ivory more lustrous than the hues of 
sunset ; in his Miracle of S. Agnes, that lamb-like 
maiden with her snow-white lamb among the soldiers 
and the priests of Rome, Tintoretto has proved 
beyond all question that the fiery genius of Titanic 
artists can pierce and irradiate the placid and the 
tender secrets of the soul with more consummate 
mastery than falls to the lot of those who make 
tranquillity their special province.^ 

Paolo Veronese never penetrated to this inner 
shrine of beauty, this Holiest of Holies where 
the spiritual graces dwell. He could not paint 
waxen limbs, with silver lights and golden and 
transparent mysteries of shadow, like those of Bac- 
chus, Eve, and Ariadne. Titian himself was power- 
less to imagine movement like that of Aphrodite 
floating in the air, or of Madonna adjuring Christ in. 
the Paradiso, or of Christ Himself judging by the 
silent simplicity of His divine attitude the worldly 
judge at whose tribunal He stands, or of the tempter 
raising his jeweled arms aloft to dazzle with mere- 
tricious brilliancy the impassive God above him, or 
of Eve leaning in irresistible seductiveness against 
the fatal tree, or of S. Mark down-rushing through 
the sky to save the slave that cried to him, or of the 

* The first of these pictures is in the Ducal Palace, the other two 
in the Academy at Venice. 



HARMONY OF TITIAN'S STYLE. 379 

Mary who has fallen asleep with folded hands from 
utter lassitude of agony at the foot of the cross. 

It is in these attitudes, movements, gestures, 
that Tintoretto makes the human form an index and 
symbol of the profoundest, most tragic, most delicious 
thought and feeling of the inmost soul. In day- 
light radiancy and equable coloring he is surpassed 
perhaps by Veronese. In mastery of every portion 
of his art, in solidity of execution, and in unwaver- 
ing hold upon his subject, he falls below the level of 
Titian. Many of his pictures are unworthy of his 
genius — hurriedly designed, rapidly dashed upon the 
canvas, studied by candlelight from artificial models, 
with abnormal effects of light and dark, hastily 
daubed with pigments that have not stood the test of 
time. He was a gigantic improvisatore : that is the 
worst thing we can say of him. But in the swift 
intuitions of the imagination, in the purities and 
sublimities of the prophet-poet's soul, neither Vero- 
nese nor yet even Titian can approach him. 

The greatest difficulty meets the critic who 
attempts to speak of Titian. To seize the salient 
characteristics of an artist whose glory it is to offer 
nothing over-prominent, and who keeps the middle 
path of perfection, is impossible. As complete 
health may be termed the absence of obtrusive 
sensation, as virtue has been called the just propor- 
tion between two opposite extravagances, so is 



38o RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

Titian's art a golden mean of joy unbroken by 
brusque movements of the passions — a well-tem- 
pered harmony in which no thrilling note suggests 
the possibility of discord. In his work the world and 
men cease to be merely what they are ; he makes 
them what they ought to be : and this he does by 
separating what is beautiful in sensuous life from its 
alloy of painful meditation and of burdensome en- 
deavor. The disease of thought is unknown in 
his kingdom ; no divisions exist between the spirit 
and the flesh ; the will is thwarted by no obstacles. 
When we think of Titian, we are irresistibly led to 
think of music. His Assumption of Madonna (the 
greatest single oil-painting in the world, if we except 
Raphaels Madonna di San Sisto^ can best be de- 
scribed as a symphony — a symphony of color, where 
every hue is brought into harmonious combination — 
a symphony of movement, where every line contrib- 
utes to melodious rhythm — a symphony of light 
without a cloud — a symphony of joy in which the 
heavens and earth sing Hallelujah. Tintoretto, in 
the Scuola di San Rocco, painted an Assumption of 
the Virgin with characteristic energy and impulsive- 
ness. A group of agitated men around an open 
tomb, a rush of air and clash of seraph wings above, 
a blaze of glory, a woman borne with sidewise- 
swaying figure from darkness into light — that is his 
picture, all brio, excitement, speed. Quickly con- 



TITIAN'S ASSUMPTION, 381 

ceived, hastily executed, this painting bears the im- 
press of its author's impetuous genius. But Titian 
worked by a different method. On the earth, among 
the apostles, there is action enough and passion; 
ardent faces straining upward, impatient men raising 
impotent arms and vainly divesting themselves of 
their mantles, as though they too might follow her 
they love. In heaven is radiance, half eclipsing the 
archangel who holds the crown, and revealing the 
father of spirits in an aureole of golden fire. Be- 
tween earth and heaven, amid choirs of angelic 
children, rises the mighty mother of the faith of 
Christ, who was Mary and is now a goddess, ecstatic 
yet tranquil, not yet accustomed to the skies, but 
far above the grossness and the incapacities of 
earth. Her womanhood is so complete that those 
for whom the meaning of her Catholic legend is lost 
may hail in her humanity personified. 

The grand manner can reach no further than 
in this picture — serene, composed, meditated, en- 
during, yet full of dramatic force and of profound 
feeling. Whatever Titian chose to touch, whether 
it was classical mythology or portrait, history or 
sacred subject, he treated in this large and healthful 
style. It is easy to tire of Veronese; it is pos- 
sible to be fatigued by Tintoretto. Titian, like 
nature, waits not for moods or humors in the 
spectator. He gives to the mind joy of which 



382 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

it can never weary, pleasures that can not satiate, 
a satisfaction not to be repented of, a sweetness 
that will not pall. The least instructed and the 
simple feel his influence as strongly as the wise or 
learned 

In the course of this attempt to describe the 
specific qualities of Tintoretto, Veronese, and Titian, 
I have been more at pains to distinguish differ- 
ences than to point out similarities. What they 
had in common was the Renaissance spirit as this 
formed itself in Venice. Nowhere in Italy was art 
more wholly emancipated from obedience to ecclesias- 
tical traditions, without losing the character of genial 
and natural piety. Nowhere was the Christian 
history treated with a more vivid realism, harmo- 
nized more simply with pagan mythology, or more 
completely purged of mysticism. The Umbrian de- 
votion felt by Raphael in his boyhood, the prophecy 
of Savonarola, and the Platonism of Ficino absorbed 
by Michael Angelo at Florence, the scientific pre- 
occupations of Lionardo and the antiquarian inter- 
ests of Mantegna, were all alike unknown at Venice. 
Among the Venetian painters there was no conflict 
between art and religion, or art and curiosity — no 
reaction against previous pietism, no perplexity of 
conscience, no confusion of aims. Titian, Tintoretto, 
and Veronese were children of the people, men 
of the world, men of pleasure ; wealthy, urbane, 



THE VENETIAN RENAISSANCE. 383 

independent, pious — they were all these by turns; 
but they were never mystics, scholars, or philoso- 
phers. In their aesthetic ideal religion found a 
place, nor was sensuality rejected ; but the religion 
was sane and manly, the sensuality was vigorous 
and virile. Not the intellectual greatness of the 
Renaissance, but its happiness and freedom, was 
what they represented. 



CHAPTER VIII 

LIFE OF MICHAEL ANGELO. 

Contrast of Michael Angelo and Cellini — Parentage and Boyhood of 
Michael Angelo — Work with Ghirlandajo — Gardens of S. Marco 
— The Medicean Circle — Early Essays in Sculpture — Visit to Bo- 
logna — First Visit to Rome — The * Pieta' of S. Peter's — Michael 
Angelo as a t*atriot and a Friend of the Medici — Cartoon for the 
Battle of Pisa — Michael Angelo and Julius II. — The Tragedy of 
the Tomb — Design for the Pope's Mausoleum — Visit to Carrara — 
Flight from Rome — Michael Angelo at Bologna — Bronze Statue of 
Julius — Return to Rome — Ceiling of the Sistine Chapel — Greek 
and Modern Art — Raphael — Michael Angelo and Leo X. — S. Lo- 
renzo — The New Sacristy — Circumstances under which it was de- 
signed and partly finished — Meaning of the Allegories — Incom- 
plete State of Michael Angelo's Marbles — Paul III. — The 'Last 
Judgment ' — Critiques of Contemporaries — The Dome of S. Peter's 
— Vittoria Colonna — Tommaso Cavalieri — Personal Habits of 
Michael Angelo — His Emotional Nature — Last Illness. 

The life of Italian artists at the time of the Re- 
naissance may be illustrated by two biographies. 
Michael Angelo Buonarroti and Benvenuto Cellini 
were almost opposite in all they thought and felt, 
experienced and aimed at. The one impressed his 
own strong personality on art ; the other reflected 
the light and shadow of the age in the record of 
his manifold existence. Cellini hovered, like some 
strono;-winored creature, on the surface of human 



BUONARROTI AND CELLINI. 385 

activity, yielding himself to every impulse, seeking 
every pleasure, and of beauty feeling only the rude 
animal compulsion. Deep philosophic thoughts, 
ideas of death and judgment, the stern struggles of 
the soul, encompassed Michael Angelo ; the service 
of beauty was with him religion. Cellini was the 
creature of the moment — the glass and mirror of 
corrupt, enslaved, yet still resplendent Italy. In 
Michael Angelo the genius of the Renaissance 
culminated : but his character was rather that of 
an austere Republican, free and solitary amid 
the multitudes of slaves and courtiers. Michael 
Angelo made art the vehicle of lofty and soul- 
shaking thought. Cellini brought the fervor of an 
inexhaustibly active nature to the service of sen- 
suality, and taught his art to be the handmaid of a 
soulless paganism. In these two men, therefore, we 
study two aspects of their age. How far both were 
exceptional need not here be questioned ; since their 
singularity consists not so much in being differ- 
ent from other Italians of the sixteenth century as 
in concentrating qualities elsewhere scattered and 
imperfect. 

Michael Angelo was born in 1475 at Caprese, 
among the mountains of the Casentino, where his 
father Lodovico held the office of Podest^. His 
ancestry was honorable ; the Buonarroti even 
claimed descent, but apparently without due reason, 



386 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY, 

from the princely house of Canossa.^ His mother 
gave him to be suckled by a stone-cutter's wife at 
Settignano, so that in after-days he used to say that 
he had drawn in the love of chisels and mallets with 
his nurse's milk. As he grew, the boy developed 
an invincible determination toward the arts. Lo- 
dovico, from motives of pride and prudence, opposed 
his wishes, but without success. Michael Angelo 
made friends with the lad Granacci, who was ap- 
prenticed to Domenico Ghirlandajo, and at last 
induced his father to sign articles for him to the 
same painter. In Ghirlandajo's workshop he learned 
the rudiments of art, helping in the execution of the 
frescoes at S. Maria Novella, until such time as the 
pupil proved his superiority as a draughtsman to his 
teacher. The rupture between Michael Angelo and 
Ghirlandajo might be compared with that between 
Beethoven and Haydn. In both cases a proud, 
uncompromising, somewhat scornful student sought 
aid from a master great in his own line but inferior 
in fire and originality of genius.^ In both cases 

^ See Vasari, vol. xii. p. 333, and Gotti's 'Vita di Michaelangelo 
Buonarroti,' vol. i. p. 4, for a discussion of this claim, and for a letter 
written by Alessandro Count of Canossa, in 1520, to the artist. 

" That Michael Angelo was contemptuous to brother artists is 
proved by what Torrigiani said to Cellini : * Aveva per usanza di uccel- 
lare tutti quelli che dissegnavano.' He called Perugino goffo, told 
Francia's son that his father made handsomer men by night than by 
day, and cast in Lionardo's teeth that he could not finish the equestrian 
statue of the Duke of Milan. It is therefore not improbable that when, 
according to the legend, he corrected a drawing of Ghirlandajo's, he 
may have said things unendurable to the elder painter. 



BOYHOOD AND YOUTH, 387 

the moment came when pupil and teacher per- 
ceived that the eagle could no longer be confined 
within the hawk's nest, and that henceforth it must 
sweep the skies alone. After leaving Ghirlandajo's 
bottega at the age of sixteen, Michael Angelo did in 
truth thenceforward through his life pursue his art 
alone. Granacci procured him an introduction to 
the Medici, and the two friends together frequented 
those gardens of S. Marco where Lorenzo had placed 
his collection of antiquities. There the youth dis- 
covered his vocation. Having begged a piece of 
marble and a chisel, he struck out the Faun's mask 
that still is seen in the Bargello. It is worth noticing 
that Michael Angelo seems to have done no merely 
prentice-work. Not a fragment of his labor from 
the earliest to the latest was insignificant, and only 
such thoughts as he committed to the perishable 
materials of bronze or paper have been lost. There 
was nothing tentative in his genius. Into art, as 
into a rich land, he came and conquered. In like 
manner, the first sonnet composed by Dante is 
scarcely less precious than the last lines of the Para- 
dzso. This is true of all the highest artistic na- 
tures, who need no preparations and have no period 
of groping. 

Lorenzo de' Medici discerned in Michael Angelo 
a youth of eminent genius, and took the lad into his 
own household The astonished father found him- 



388 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

self suddenly provided with a comfortable post and 
courted for the sake of the young sculptor. In 
Lorenzo's palace the real education of Michael 
Angelo began. He sat at the same table with 
Ficino, Pico, and Poliziano, listening to dialogues on 
Plato and drinking in the golden poetry of Greece. 
Greek hterature and philosophy, expounded by the 
men who had discovered them, and who were no 
less proud of their discovery than Columbus of his 
passage to the Indies, first molded his mind to those 
lofty thoughts which it became the task of his life to 
express in form. At the same time he heard the 
preaching of Savonarola. In the Duomo and the 
cloister of S. Marco another portion of his soul was 
touched, and he acquired that deep religious tone 
which gives its majesty and terror to the Sistine. 
Much in the same way was Milton educated by the 
classics in conjunction with the Scriptures. Both of 
these austere natures assimilated from pagan art and 
Jewish prophecy the two-fold elements they needed 
for their own imaginative Hfe. Both Michael An- 
gelo and Milton, in spite of their parade of classic 
style, were separated from the Greek world by a 
gulf of Hebrew and of Christian feehng. 

While Michael Angelo was thus engaged in 
studying antique sculpture and in listening to Pico 
and Savonarola, he carved his first bass-relief — a 
Battle of Hercules with the Centaurs, suggested to 



THE PIETA. 389 

him by Poliziano.^ Meantime Lorenzo died. His 
successor Piero set the young man, it is said, to 
model a snow statue, and then melted like a shape 
of snow himself down from his pedestal of power in 
Florence. Upon the expulsion of the tyrant and the 
proclamation of the new republic, it was dangerous 
for house-friends of the Casa Medici to be seen in 
the city. Michael Angelo, therefore, made his way 
to Bologna, where he spent some months in the 
palace of Gian Francesco Aldovrandini, studying 
Dante and working at an angel for the shrine of S. 
Dominic. As soon, however, as it seemed safe to 
do so, he returned to Florence ; and to this period 
belongs the statue of the Sleeping Cupid, which was 
sold as an antique to the Cardinal Raffaello Riario. 
A dispute about the price of this Cupid took 
Michael Angelo in 1496 to Rome, where it was des- 
tined that the greater portion of his life should be 
spent and his noblest works of art should be pro- 
duced. Here, while the Borgias were turning the 
Vatican into a den of thieves and harlots, he exe- 
cuted the purest of all his statues — a Pieta in marble.^ 
Christ is lying dead upon His mother's knees. With 
her right arm she supports his shoulders ; her left 

* Engraved in outline in Harford's * Illustrations of the Genius of 
Michael Angelo Buonarroti,' Colnaghi, 1857. 

"^ This group, placed in S. Peter's, was made for the French Car- 
dinal de Saint Denys. It should be said that the first work of 
Michael Angelo in Rome was the ' Bacchus ' now in the Florentine 
Bargello, executed for Jacopo Gallo, a Roman gentleman. 



390 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

hand is gently raised as though to say, ' Behold and 
see ! ' All that art can do to make death beautiful 
and grief sublime is achieved in this masterpiece, 
which was never surpassed by Michael Angelo in 
later years. Already, at the age of four-and-twenty, 
he had matured his ' terrible manner/ Already 
were invented in his brain that race of superhuman 
beings who became the hieroglyphs of his impas- 
sioned utterance. Madonna has the small head and 
heroic torso used by this master to symbolize force. 
We feel she has no difficulty in holding the dead 
Christ upon her ample lap and in her powerful arms. 
Yet while the Pieta is wholly Michael Angelesque, we 
find no lack of repose, none of those contorted lines 
that are commonly urged against his manner. It is 
a sober and harmonious composition, combining the 
profoundest religious feeling with classical tranquil- 
lity of expression. Again, though the group is for- 
cibly original, this effect of originality is produced, 
as in all the best work of the golden age, not by 
new and startling conception, but by the handling 
of an old and well-worn motive with the grandeur 
of consummate style. What the genius of Italian 
sculpture had for generations been striving after 
finds its perfect realization here. It was precisely 
by thus crowning the endeavors of antecedent 
artists — by bringing the opening buds of painting 
and sculpture to full blossom, and exhausting the 



ROME AND FLORENCE, 391 

resources of a long-sustained and common inspira- 
tion — that the great masters proved their supremacy 
and rendered an advance beyond their vantage- 
ground impossible. To those who saw and compre- 
hended this Pieta in 1 500, it must have been evident 
that a new power of portraying the very soul had 
been manifested in sculpture — a power unknown to 
the Greeks because it lay outside the sphere of 
their spiritual experience, and unknown to modern 
artists because it was beyond their faculties of exe- 
cution and conception. Yet who in Rome, among 
the courtiers of the Borgias, had brain or heart to 
understand these things '^ 

In 1 501 Michael Angelo returned to Florence, 
where he stayed until the year 1505. This period 
was fruitful of results on which his after-fame de- 
pended. The great statue of David, the two un- 
finished medallions of Madonna in relief, the Holy 
Family of the Tribune painted for Angelo Doni, and 
the Cartoon of the Battle of Pisa were now produced ; 
and no man's name, not even Lionardo's, stood higher 
in esteem thenceforward. It will be remembered that 
Savonarola was now dead, but that his constitution 
still existed under the presidency of Pietro Soderini 
— the non Tnai abbas tanza lodato Cavalier e, as Pitti 
calls him, the anima scioccaoi Machiavelli's epigram.^ 

* Pitti approved of the form of government represented by Sode- 
rini. Machiavelli despised the want of decision that made him quit 



392 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

Since Michael Angelo at this time was employed in 
the service of masters who had superseded his old 
friends and patrons, it may be well to review here 
his attitude in general toward the house of Medici. 
Throughout his lifetime there continued a conflict 
between the artist and the citizen — the artist owing 
education and employment to successive members 
of that house, the citizen resenting their despotism 
and doing all that in him lay at times to keep them. 
out of Florence. As a patriot, as the student of Dante 
and the disciple of Savonarola, Michael Angelo 
detested tyrants.^ One of his earliest madrigals, 
conceived as a dialogue between Florence and her 
exiles, expresses his mind so decidedly that I have 
ventured to translate it;^ the exiles first address 
Florence, and she answers: 

* Lady, for joy of lovers numberless 

Thou wast created fair as angels are. 

Sure God hath fallen asleep in heaven afar, 

"When one man calls the boon of many his. 

Give back to streaming eyes 

The daylight of Thy face, that seems to shun 

Those who must live defrauded of their bliss I 



Florence, and the EvvSeia of the man. Hence their curiously-conflict- 
ing phrases. 

^ See the chapter entitled ' Delia Malitia e pessime Conditioni del 
Tyranno,' in Savonarola's ' Tractato circa el reggimento e governo della 
Citta di Firenze composto ad instantia delli excelsi Signori al tempo 
di Giuliano Salviati, Gonfaloniere di Justitia.' A more terrible picture 
has never been drawn by any analyst of human vice and cmelty and 
weakness. 

^ Guasti's edition of the 'Rime,' p. 26. 



RELATION TO THE MEDICI, 393 

* Vex not your pure desire with tears and sighs ; 
For he who robs you of my light hath none. 
Dwelling in fear, sin hath no happiness ; 
Since amid those who love, their joy is less 
Whose great desire great plenty still curtails. 
Than theirs who, poor, have hope that never fails.' 

As an artist, owing his advancement to Lorenzo, 
he had accepted favors binding him by ties of grat- 
itude to the Medici, and even involving him in the 
downfall of their house. For Leo X. he undertook 
to build the fagade of S. Lorenzo and the Laurentian 
Library. For Clement VII. he began the statues of 
the Dukes of Urbino and Nemours. Yet, while 
accepting these commissions from Medicean Popes, 
he could not keep his tongue from speaking openly 
against their despotism. After the sack of Prato it 
appears from his correspondence that he had ex- 
posed himself to danger by some expression of in- 
dignation.^ This was in 15 12, when Soderini fled 
and left the gates of Florence open to the Cardinal 
Giovanni de' Medici. During the siege of Florence 
in 1529 he fortified Samminiato, and allowed himself 
to be named one of the Otto di Guerra chosen for 
the express purpose of defending Florence against 
the Medici.^ After the fall of the city he made 

' He defends himself thus in a letter to Lodovico Buonarroti : 
' Del caso dei Medici io non o mai parlato contra di loro casa nessuna, 
se non in quel modo che s'e parlato generahncnte per ogn' uomo, 
come fu del caso di Prato ; che se le pietre avessin saputo parlare, 
n'avrebbono parlato.' 

^ It seems clear from the correspondence in the Archivio Buonar- 
roti, recently published, th?t when Michael Angeio fled from Florence 



394 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

peace with Clement by consenting to finish the 
tombs of S. Lorenzo. Yet, while doing all he 
could to save those insignificant dukes from oblivion 
by the immortality of his art, Michael Angelo was 
conscious of his own and his country's shame. The 
memorable lines placed in the mouth of his Night 
sufficiently display his feeling after the final return 
of the Medici in 1530:^ 

Sweet is my sleep, but more to be mere stone, 
So long as ruin and dishonor reign ; 
To hear naught, to feel naught, is my great gain ; 
Then wake me not, speak in an undertone. 

When Clement VI I. died, the last real repre- 
sentative of Michael Angelo's old patrons perished, 
and the sculptor was free to quit Florence forever. 
During the reign of Duke Cosimo he never set foot in 
his native city. It is thus clear that the patriot, the 
artist, and the man of honor were at odds in him. 
Loyalty obliged him to serve the family to whom he 
owed so much ; he was, moreover, dependent for 
opportunities of doing great work on the very men 
whose public policy he execrated. Hence arose a 
compromise and a confusion, hard to accommodate 
with our conception of his upright and unyielding 
temper. Only by voluntary exile, and after age had 

to Venice in 1 529, he did so under the pressure of no ignoble panic, 
but because his life was threatened by a traitor, acting possibly at the 
secret instance of Malatesta Baglioni. See Heath Wilson, pp. 326- 

330- 

' See Guasti, p. 4. 



THE BATTLE OF PISA. 395 

made him stubborn to resist seductive offers, could 
Michael Angelo act up to the promptings of his 
heart and declare himself a citizen who held no truce 
with tyrants. I have already in this book had occa- 
sion to compare Dante, Michael Angelo, and Machi- 
avelli.^ In estimating the conduct of the two last, 
it must not be forgotten that, by the action of in- 
evitable causes, republican freedom had become in 
Italy a thing of the past ; and in judging between 
Machiavelli and Michael Angelo, we have to re- 
member that the sculptor's work involved no sacri- 
fice of principle or self-respect. Carving statues for 
the tombs of Medicean dukes was a different matter 
from dedicating the Prince to them. 

This digression, though necessary for the right 
understanding of Michael Angelo's relation to the 
Medici, has carried me beyond his Florentine resi- 
dence in 1 501-1505. The great achievement of 
that period was not the David, but the Cartoon for 
the Battle of Pisa} The hall of the Consiglio 

^ * Age of the Despots,' p. 318. 

"^ To these years we must also reckon the two unfinished medal- 
lions of ' Madonna and the Infant Christ,' the circular oil-picture of 
the ' Holy Family,' painted for Angelo Doni, and the beautiful un- 
finished picture of ' Madonna with the boy Jesus ' and ' S. John ' in the 
National Gallery. The last of these works is one of the loveliest of 
Michael Angelo's productions, whether we regard the symmetry of its 
composition or the refinement of its types. The two groups of two 
boys standing behind the central group on either hand of the Virgin 
have incomparable beauty of form. The supreme style of the Sistine 
is here revealed to us in embryo. Whether the * Entombment/ also un« 



396 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

Grande had been opened, and one wall had been 
assigned to Lionardo. Michael Angelo was now 
invited by the Signory to prepare a design for 
another side of the state-chamber. When he dis- 
played his cartoon to the Florentines, they pro- 
nounced that Da Vinci, hitherto the undisputed 
prince of painting, was surpassed. It is impossible 
for us to form an opinion in this matter, since both 
cartoons are lost beyond recovery.^ We only know 
that, as Cellini says, ' while they lasted, they formed 
the school of the whole world,' ^ and made an epoch 
in the history of art. When we inquire what was 
the subject of Michael Angelo's famous picture, we 
find that he had aimed at representing nothing of 
more moment than a group of soldiers suddenly sur- 
prised by a trumpet-call to battle, while bathing in 

finished, and also in the National Gallery, belongs to this time, and 
whether it be Michael Angelo's at all, is a matter for the experts to de- 
cide. To my perception, it is quite unworthy of the painter of the 
Doni ' Holy Family ; ' nor can I think that his want of practice in oil- 
painting will explain its want of charm and vigor. 

* It has long been believed that Baccio Bandinelli destroyed 
Michael Angelo's ; but Grimm, in his Life of the sculptor (vol. i. p. 
376, Eng. Tr.), adduces solid arguments against this legend. A few 
studies, together with the engravings of portions by Marc Antonio 
and Agostino Veneziano, enable us to form a notion of the composi- 
tion. At Holkham there is an old copy of the larger portion of the 
cartoon, which has been engraved by Schiavonetti, and reproduced in 
Harford's ' Illustrations,' plate x. 

* Vita, p. 23. Cellini, the impassioned admirer of Michael Angelo, 
esteemed this cartoon so highly that he writes : ' Sebbene il divine 
Michelagnolo fece la gran cappella di Papa Julio da poi, non arrive 
mai a questo segno alia meta : la sua virtii non aggiunse mai da poi 
alia forza di quel primi studj.' 



JULIUS II. yyj 

the Arno — a crowd of naked men in every posture 
indicating haste, anxiety, and struggle. Not for its 
intellectual meaning, not for its color, not for its 
sentiment, was this design so highly prized. Its 
science won the admiration of artists and the public. 
At this period of the Renaissance the bold and per- 
fect drawing of the body gave an exquisite delight. 
Hence, perhaps, Vasari's vapid talk about ' strava- 
ganti attitudini,' * divine figure,' ' scorticamenti,' and 
so forth — as if the soul of figurative art were in such 
matters. The science of Michael Angelo, which in 
his own mind was sternly subordinated to thought, 
had already turned the weaker heads of his genera- 
tion.^ A false ideal took possession of the fancy, 
and such criticism as that of Vasari and Pietro 
Aretino became inevitable. 

Meanwhile, a new Pope had been elected, and in 
1505 Michael Angelo was once more called to 
Rome. Throughout his artist's life he oscillated 
thus between Rome and Florence — Florence the 
city of his ancestry, and Rome the city of his soul ; 
Florence where he learned his art, and Rome where 
he displayed what art can do of highest. Julius 
was a patron of different stamp from Lorenzo the 
Magnificent. He was not learned in book-lore: 
* Place a sword in my hand ! ' he said to the sculptor 
at Bologna ; ' of letters I know nothing.' Yet he 

* The cartoon was probably exhibited in 1 505. See Gotti, vol. i. p 35. 



398 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

was no less capable of discerning excellence than 
the Medici himself, and his spirit strove incessantly 
after the accomplishment of vast designs. Between 
Julius and Michael Angelo there existed the strong 
bond of sympathy due to community of tempera- 
ment. Both aimed at colossal achievements in their 
respective fields of action. The imagination of both 
was fired by large and simple rather than luxurious 
and subtle thoughts. Both were nomini terribili, to 
use a phrase denoting vigor of character made for- 
midable by an abrupt uncompromising temper. 
Both worked con furia, with the impetuosity of 
daemonic natures ; and both left the impress of their 
individuality graven indelibly upon their age. 

Julius ordered the sculptor to prepare his mau- 
soleum. Michael Angelo asked, 'Where am I to 
place it 1 ' Julius replied, * In S. Peter s.' But the 
old basilica of Christendom was too small for this 
ambitious pontiff's sepulchre, designed by the auda- 
cious artist. It was therefore decreed that a new 
S. Peter's should be built to hold it. In this way 
the two great labors of Buonarroti's life were 
mapped out for him in a moment. But, by a strange 
contrariety ot fate, to Bramante and San Gallo fell 
respectively the planning and the spoiling of S. 
Peter's. It was only in extreme old age that Michael 
Angelo crowned it with that world's miracle, the 
dome. The mausoleum, to form a canopy for which 



THE MA USOLEUM. 399 

the building was designed, dwindled down at last to 
the statue of Moses thrust out of the way in the 
church of S. Pietro in Vincoli. La tragedia della 
Sepoltura, as Condivi aptly terms the history of 
Giulio's monument, began thus in 1505 and dragged 
on till 1545.^ Rarely did Michael Angelo under- 
take a work commensurate with his creative power, 
but something came to interrupt its execution ; while 
tasks outside his sphere, for which he never bar- 
gained — the painting of the Sistine Chapel, the 
fagade of S. Lorenzo, the fortification of Samminiato 
— ^were thrust upon him in the midst of other more 
congenial labors. What we possess of his achieve- 
ment is a torso of his huge designs. 

Giulio's tomb, as he conceived it, would have 
been the most stupendous monument of sculpture in 
the world.^ That mountain of marble covered with 
figures wrought in stone and bronze was meant to 
be the sculptured poem of the thought of Death ; no 
mere apotheosis of Pope Julius, but a pageant of the 
soul triumphant over the limitations of mortality. 
All that dignifies humanity — arts, sciences, and laws ; 
the victory that crowns heroic effort ; the majesty 
of contemplation, and the energy of action — was 

^ Gotti, pp. 277-282. 

' Springer, in his essay, 'Michael Agnolo in Rome,' p. 21, makes 
out that this large design was not conceived till after the death of 
Julius. It is difficult to form a clear notion of the many changes in 
the plan of the tomb, between 1 505 and 1 542, when Michael Angelo 
signed the last contract with the heirs of Julius. 



400 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

symbolized upon ascending tiers of the great pyra- 
mid ; while the genii of heaven and earth upheld the 
open tomb where lay the dead man waiting for the 
Resurrection. Of this gigantic scheme only one 
imperfect drawing now remains.^ The Moses and 
the Bound Captives'^ are all that Michael Angelo 
accomplished. For forty years the Moses remained 
in his workshop. For forty years he cherished a 
hope that his plan might still in part be executed, 
complaining the while that it would have been better 
for him to have made sulphur matches all his life 
than to have taken up the desolating artist's trade. 
* Every day/ he cries, * I am stoned as though I had 
crucified Christ. My youth has been lost, bound hand 
and foot to this tomb.'^ It was decreed apparently 
that Michael Angelo should exist for after-ages as 
a fragment; and such might Pheidias among the 
Greeks have been, if he had worked for ephemeral 
Popes and bankrupt princes instead of Pericles. 
Italy in the sixteenth century, dislocated, distracted, 
and drained of her material resources, gave no op- 
portunity to artists for the creation of monuments 
colossal in their unity. 

Michael Angelo spent eight months at this 

* In the Uffizzi at Florence. See Heath Wilson, plate vi. 

' Boboli Gardens, Bargello, Louvre. These captives are un- 
finished. The * Rachel ' and ' Leah ' at S. Pietro in Vincoli were com- 
mitted to pupils by Michael Angelo. 

' ' Che mi fosse messo a fare zolfanelli. . . . Son ogni di lapidato, 
come se havessi crucifisso Cristo. . . . io mi truovo avere perduta 
tutta la mia giovinezza legato a questa sepoltura.' 



FLIGHT FROM ROME. 401 

period among the stone-quarries of Carrara, select- 
ing marble for the Pope's tomb.^ There his brain, 
always teeming with gigantic conceptions, suggested 
to him a new fancy. Could not the headland jut- 
ting out beyond Sarzana into the Tyrrhene Sea 
be carved by his workmen into a Pharos? To 
transmute a mountain into a statue, holding a city 
in either hand, had been the dream of a Greek 
artist. Michael Angelo revived the bold thought ; 
but to execute it would have been almost beyond 
his power. Meanwhile, in November, 1505, the 
marble was shipped, and the quays of Rome were 
soon crowded with blocks destined for the mauso- 
leum. But when the sculptor arrived, he found 
that enemies had been poisoning the Pope's mind 
against him, and that Julius had abandoned the 
scheme of the mausoleum. On six successive days 
he was denied entrance to the Vatican, and the 
last time with such rudeness that he determined 
to quit Rome.^ He hurried straightway to his 
house, sold his effects, mounted, and rode without 
further ceremony toward Florence, sending to the 
Pope a written message bidding him to seek for 
Michael Angelo elsewhere in future than in Rome. 
It is related that Julius, anxious to recover what 
had been so lightly lost, sent several couriers to 

' Gotti, p. 42. Grimm makes two visits to Carrara in 1505 and 
1506, vol. i. pp. 239, 243. 

'^ See liis letter. Gotti, p. 44. 



j^02 RENAISSANCE IN ITAL F. 

bring him back.^ Michael Angelo announced that 
he intended to accept the Sultan's commission for 
building a bridge at Pera, and refused to be per- 
suaded to return to Rome. This was at Poggi- 
bonsi. When he had reached Florence, Julius 
addressed himself to Soderini, who, unwilling to 
displease the Pope, induced Michael Angelo to 
seek the pardon of the master he had so abruptly 
quitted. By that time Julius had left the city for 
the camp ; and when Michael Angelo finally ap- 
peared before him, fortified with letters from the 
Signory of Florence, it was at Bologna that they 
met. * You have waited thus long, it seems,' said 
the Pope, well satisfied but surly, 'till we should 
come ourselves to seek you.' The prelate who had 
introduced the sculptor now began to make excuses 
for him, whereupon Juhus turned in a fury upon 
the officious courtier, and had him beaten from 
his presence. A few days after this encounter 
Michael Angelo was ordered to cast a bronze 
statue of Julius for the frontispiece of S. Petronio. 
The sculptor objected that brass-foundry was not 
his affair. * Never mind,' said Julius ; * get to 

' Our authorities for this episode in Michael Angelo's biography 
are mainly Vasari and Condivi. Though there Tnay be exaggeration 
in the legend, it is certain that a correspondence took place between 
the Pope and the Gonfalonier of Florence to bring about his return. 
See Heath Wilson, pp. 79-87, and the letter to Giuliano di San Gallo 
in Milanesi's 'Archivio Buonarroti,' p. 377. Michael Angelo appears 
to have had some reason to fear assassination in Rome. 



STATUE OF JULIUS. 403 

work, and we will cast your statue till it comes 
out perfect.'^ Michael Angelo did as he was bid, 
and the statue was set up in 1508 above the great 
door of the churcL The Pope was seated, with 
his right hand raised ; in the other were the keys. 
When Julius asked him whether he was meant to 
bless or curse the Bolognese with that uplifted hand, 
Buonarroti found an answer worthy of a courtier: 
' Your Holiness is threatening this people, if it be 
not wise/ Less than four years afterward Julius 
lost his hold upon Bologna, the party of the Ben- 
tivogli returned to power, and the statue was de- 
stroyed. A bronze cannon, called the Giulia, was 
made out of Michael Angelo's masterpiece by the 
best gunsmith of his century, Alfonso, Duke of 
Ferrara. 

It seems that Michael Angelo's flight from 
Rome in 1506 was due not only to his disappoint- 
ment about the tomb, but also to his fear lest Julius 
should give him uncongenial work to do. Bra- 
mante, if we may believe the old story, had whis- 
pered that it was ill-omened for a man to build 
his own sepulchre, and that it would be well to 
employ the sculptor's genius upon the ceiling of 
the Sistine Chapel. Accordingly, on his return to 
Rome in 1508, this new task was allotted him. 

^ See Michael Angelo's letters to Giovan Francesco Fattucci, and 
his family. Gotti, pp. 55-65. 



404 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

In vain did Michael Angelo remind his master 
of the months wasted in the quarries of Carrara ; 
in vain he pointed to his designs for the monument, 
and pleaded that he was not a painter by profes- 
sion.^ Julius had made up his mind that he should 
paint the Sistine. Was not the cartoon at Flor- 
ence a sufficient proof that he could do this if he 
chose, and had he not learned the art of fresco in 
the bottega of his master Ghirlandajo ? Whatever 
his original reluctance may have been, it was speedily 
overcome ; and the cartoons for the ceiling, projected 
with the unity belonging to a single great concep- 
tion, were ready by the summer of 1508.* 

The difficulty of his new task aroused the artistes 
energy. If we could accept the legend whereby 
contemporaries expressed their admiration for this 

* See the sonnet to Giovanni da Pistoja : 

La mia pittura morta 
Difendi orma', Giovanni, e '1 mio onore, 
Non sendo in loco bon, ne io pittore. 

' According to the first plan, Michael Angelo bargained with the 
Pope for twelve Apostles in the lunettes, and another part to be 
filled vdth ornament in the usual manner — 'dodici Apostoli nelle 
lunette, e'l resto un certo partimento ripieno d'adornamenti come si 
usa.* Michael Angelo, after making designs for this commission, 
told the Pope he thought the roof would look poor, because the 
Apostles were poor folk — ' perche furon poveri anche loro.' He then 
began his cartoons for the vault as it now exists. See the letter to 
Ser Giovan Francesco Fattucci, in the ' Archivio Buonarroti,' Milanesi, 
pp. 426, 427. This seems to be the foundation for an old story of the 
Pope's complaining that the Sistine roof looked poor without gild- 
ing, and Michael Angelo's reply that the biblical personages depicted 
there were but poor people. 



THE LEGEND OF THE SISTINE. 405 

Titanic labor, we should have to believe the im- 
possible — that Michael Angelo ground his own 
colors, prepared his own plaster, and completed 
with his own hand the whole work, after having 
first conquered the obstacles of scaffolding and 
vault-painting by machines of his own invention,^ 
and that only twenty months were devoted to the 
execution of a series of paintings almost unequaled 
in their delicacy, and surpassed by few single mas- 
terpieces in extent. What may be called the 
mythus of the Sistine Chapel has at last been 
finally disproved, partly by the personal observa- 
tions of Mr. Heath Wilson, and partly by the 
publication of Michael Angelo's correspondence.* 
Though some uncertainty remains as to the exact 
dates of the commencement and completion of the 
vault, we now know that Michael Angelo continued 
painting it at intervals during four successive years ; 
and though we are not accurately informed about 
his helpers, we no longer can doubt that able crafts- 
men yielded him assistance. On May 10, 1508, 
he signed a receipt for five hundred ducats advanced 

* Bramante, the Pope's architect, did in truth fail to construct the 
proper scaffolding, whether through inability or jealousy. Michael 
Angelo designed a superior system of his own, which became a model 
for future architects in similar constructions. 

" See chapters vi. vii. and viii. of Mr. Charles Heath Wilson's ad- 
mirable 'Life of Michel Angelo.' Aurelio Gotti's 'Vita di Michel 
Agnolo' and Anton Springer's * Michel Angelo in Rome' deserve to 
be consulted on this passage in the painter's biography. 



4o6 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

by Julius for the necessary expenses of the under- 
taking ; and on the next day he paid ten ducats 
to a mason for rough plastering and surface-finishing 
applied to the vault. There is good reason to 
believe that he began his painting during the 
autumn of 1508. On November i, 1509, a certain 
portion was uncovered to the public; and before 
the end of the year 1 5 1 2 the whole was completed. 
Thus, though the legend of Vasari and Condivi 
has been stripped of the miraculous by careful 
observation and keen-sighted criticism, enough re- 
mains to justify the sense of wonder that expressed 
itself in their exaggerated statements. No one 
but Michael Angelo could have done what he did 
in the Sistine Chapel. The conception was entirely 
his own. The execution, except in subordinate 
details and in matters pertaining to the mason's 
craft, was also his. The rapidity with which he 
labored was astounding. Mr. Heath Wilson infers 
from the condition of the plaster and the joinings 
observable in different parts that the figure of 
Adam, highly finished as it is, was painted in three 
days. Nor need we strip the romance from that 
time-honored tale of the great master's solitude. 
Lying on his back beneath the dreary vault, com- 
muning with Dante, Savonarola, and the Hebrew 
prophets in the intervals of labor, locking up the 
chapel-doors in order to elude the jealous curiosity 



THE SIS TINE CHAPEL. 407 

of rivals, eating but little and scarcely sleeping, 
he accomplished in sixteen months the first part 
of his gigantic task.^ From time to time Julius 
climbed the scaffold and inspected the painter's 
progress. Dreading lest death should come before 
the work were finished, he kept crying, 'When 
will you make an end ? ' ' When I can,' answered 
the painter. *You seem to want,' rejoined the 
petulant old man, * that I should have you thrown 
down from the scaffold.' Then Michael Angelo's 
brush stopped. The machinery was removed, and 
the frescoes were uncovered in their incomplete- 
ness to the eyes of Rome. 

Entering the Capella Sistina, and raising our 
eyes to sweep the roof, we have above us a long and 
somewhat narrow oblong space, vaulted with round 
arches, and covered from end to end, from side to 
side, with a network of human forms. The whole 
is colored like the dusky, tawny, bluish clouds of 
thunder-storms. There is no luxury of decorative 
art — no gold, no paint-box of vermilion or emerald 
green, has been lavished here. Somber and aerial, 
like shapes condensed from vapor, or dreams be- 
gotten by Ixion upon mists of eve or dawn, the 
phantoms evoked by the sculptor throng that space. 

' The conditions under which Michael Angelo worked, without a 
trained band of pupils, must have struck contemporaries, accustomed 
to Raphael's crowds of assistants, with a wonder that justified Vasari's 
emphatic language of exaggeration as to his single-handed labor. 



4o8 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

Nine compositions, carrying down the sacred history 
from the creation of light to the beginning of sin in 
Noah's household, fill the central compartments of 
the roof Beneath these, seated on the spandrels, 
are alternate prophets and sibyls, twelve in all, 
attesting to the future deliverance and judgment of 
the world by Christ. The intermediate spaces be- 
tween these larger masses on the roof and in the 
lunettes of the windows swarm with figures, some 
naked and some draped — ^women and children, boys 
and young men, grouped in tranquil attitudes, or 
adapting themselves with freedom to their station 
on the curves and angles of the architecture. In 
these subordinate creations Michael Angelo deigned 
to drop the terrible style, in order that he might 
show how sweet and full of charm his art could be. 
The grace of coloring, realized in some of those 
youthful and athletic forms, is such as no copy can 
represent. Every posture of beauty and of strength, 
simple or strained, that it is possible for men to 
assume has been depicted here. Yet the whole is 
governed by a strict sense of sobriety. The restless- 
ness of Correggio, the violent attitudinizing of Tinto- 
retto, belong alike to another and less noble spirit. 

To speak adequately of these form-poems would 
be quite impossible. Buonarroti seems to have 
intended to prove by them that the human body 
has a language inexhaustible in symbolism — every 



POETRY OF PLASTIC FORM. 409 

limb, every feature, and every attitude being a 
word full of significance to those who comprehend, 
just as music is a language whereof each note and 
chord and phrase has correspondence with the 
spiritual world. It may be presumptuous after this 
fashion to interpret the design of him who called 
into existence the heroic population of the Sistine. 
Yet Michael Angelo has written lines which in some 
measure justify the reading. This is how he closes 
one of his finest sonnets to Vittoria Colonna : 

Nor hath God deigned to show Himself elsewhere 
More clearly than in human forms sublime; 
Which, since they image Him, compel my love. 

Therefore to him a well-shaped hand, or throat, or 
head, a neck superbly poised on an athletic chest, 
the sway of the trunk above the hips, the starting of 
the muscles on the flank, the tendons of the ankle, 
the outline of the shoulder when the arm is raised, 
the backward bending of the loins, the curves of a 
woman's breast, the contours of a body careless in 
repose or strained for action, were all words preg- 
nant with profoundest meaning, whereby fit utter- 
ance might be given to the thoughts that raise man 
near to God. But, it may be asked, what poems of 
action as well as feeling are to be expressed in this 
form-language? The answer is simple. Paint or 
carve the body of a man, and, as you do it nobly, 
you will give the measure of both highest thought 



4IO RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

and most impassioned deed. This is the key to 
Michael Angelo's art. He cared but little for inani- 
mate nature. The landscapes of Italy, so eloquent 
in their sublimity and beauty, were apparently a 
blank to him. His world was the world of ideas, 
taking visible form, incarnating themselves in man. 
One language the master had to serve him in all 
need — the language of plastic human form ; but it 
was to him a tongue as rich in its variety of accent 
and of intonation as Beethoven's harmonies. 

In the Sistine Chapel, where plastic art is so 
supreme, we are bound to ask the further question, 
What was the difference between Michael Angelo 
and a Greek .? The Parthenon with its processions 
of youths and maidens, its gods and heroes, rejoic- 
ing in their strength, and robed with raiment that 
revealed their living form, made up a symphony of 
meaning as full as this of Michael Angelo, and far 
more radiant. The Greek sculptor embraced hu- 
manity in his work no less comprehensively than the 
Italian ; and what he had to say was said more plainly 
in the speech they both could use. But between 
Pheidias and Michael Angelo lay Christianity, the 
travail of the world through twenty centuries. Clear 
as morning, and calm in the unconsciousness of 
beauty, are those heroes of the youth of Hellas. All 
is grace, repose, strength shown but not asserted. 
Michael Angelo's Sibyls and Prophets are old and 



GREEK AND MODERN ART, 411 

wrinkled, bowed with thought, consumed by vigils, 
startled from tranquillity by visions, overburdened 
with the messages of God. The loveliest among 
them, the Delphic, lifts dilated eyes, as though to 
follow dreams that fly upon the paths of trance. 
Even the young men strain their splendid limbs, 
and seem to shout or shriek, as if the life in them 
contained some element of pain. * He maketh his 
angels spirits, and his ministers a flame of fire : ' this 
verse rises to our lips when we seek to describe the 
genii that crowd the cornice of the Sistine Chapel. 
The human form in the work of Pheidias wore a 
joyous and sedate serenity ; in that of Michael 
Angelo it is turbid with a strange and awful sense 
of inbreathed agitation. Through the figure-lan- 
guage of the one was spoken the pagan creed, 
bright, unperturbed, and superficial. The sculpture 
of the Parthenon accomplished the transfiguration 
of the natural man. In the other man awakes 
to a new life of contest, disillusionment, hope, 
dread, and heavenward striving. It was impos- 
sible for the Greek and the Italian, bearing so 
different a burden of prophecy, even though they 
used the same speech, to tell the same tale ; and 
this should be remembered by those critics who cast 
exaggeration and contortion in the teeth of Michael 
Angelo. Between the birth of the free spirit in 
Greece and its second birth in Italy, there yawned a 



412 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

sepulchre wherein the old faiths of the world lay 
buried and whence Christ had risea* 

The star of Raphael, meanwhile, had arisen over 
Rome. Between the two greatest painters of their 
age the difference was striking. Michael Angelo 
stood alone, his own master, fashioned in his own 
school. A band of artists called themselves by 
Raphael's name ; and in his style we trace the in- 
fluence of several predecessors. Michael Angelo 
rarely received visits, frequented no society, formed 
no pupils, and boasted of no friends at Court. 
Raphael was followed to the Vatican by crowds of 
students ; his levees were like those of a prince ; he 
counted among his intimates the best scholars and 
poets of the age ; his hand was pledged in marriage 
to a cardinal's niece. It does not appear that they 
engaged in petty rivalries, or that they came much 
into personal contact with each other. While 
Michael Angelo was so framed that he could learn 
from no man, Raphael gladly learned of Michael 
Angelo; and after the uncovering of the Sistine 
frescoes, his manner showed evident signs of altera- 

' In speaking of the Sistine I have treated Michael Angelo as a 
sculptor, and it was a sculptor who designed those frescoes. Ne to 
fittore is his own phrase. Compare an autotype of ' Adam ' in the Sis- 
tine with one of * Twilight ' in S. Lorenzo : it is clear that in the 
former Michael Angelo painted what he would have been well pleased 
to carve. A sculptor's genius was needed for the modeling of those 
many figures ; it was, moreover, not a painter's part to deal thus dryly 
with color. 



RAPHAEL AND LEO, 413 

tion. Julius, who had given Michael Angelo the 
Sistine, set Raphael to work upon the Stanze. For 
Julius were painted the Miracle of Bolsena and the 
Expulsion of Heliodorus from the Temple, scenes 
containing courtly compliments for the old Pope. 
No such compliments had been paid by Michael 
Angelo. Like his great parallel in music, Beethoven, 
he displayed an almost arrogant contempt for the 
conventionalities whereby an artist wins the favor 
of his patrons and the world. 

After the death of Julius, Leo X., in character 
the reverse of his fiery predecessor, and by tem- 
perament unsympathetic to the austere Michael 
Angelo, found nothing better for the sculptor's 
genius than to set him at work upon the fagade 
of S. Lorenzo at Florence. The better part of 
the years between 15 16 and 1520 was spent in 
quarrying marble at Carrara, Pietra Santa, and 
Seravezza. This is the most arid and unfruitful 
period of Michael Angelo's long life, a period of 
delays and thwarted schemes and servile labors. 
What makes the sense of disappointment greater is 
that the fagade of S. Lorenzo was not even finished.^ 
We hurry over this wilderness of wasted months, 
and arrive at another epoch of artistic production. 

Already in 1520 the Cardinal Giulio de' Medici 
had conceived the notion of building a sacristy in S. 

* The Laurentian Library, however, was built in 1524. 



414 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY, 

Lorenzo to receive the monuments of Cosimo, the 
founder of the house, Lorenzo the Magnificent, Giu- 
Hano Duke of Nemours, Lorenzo Duke of Urbino, 
Leo X., and himself.^ To Michael Angelo was 
committed the design, and in 1521 he began to 
apply himself to the work. Nine years had now 
elapsed since the roof of the Sistine Chapel had been 
finished, and during this time Michael Angelo had 
produced little except the Christ of S. Maria sopra 
Minerva. This new undertaking occupied him at 
intervals between 1521 and 1534, a space of time 
decisive for the fortunes of the Medici in Florence. 
Leo died, and Giulio after a few years succeeded him 
as Clement VII. The bastards of the house, Ippo- 
lito and Alessandro, were expelled from Florence 
in 1527. Rome was sacked by the Imperial troops ; 
then Michael Angelo quitted the statues and helped 
to defend his native city against the Prince of 
Orange. After the failure of the Republicans, he 
was recalled to his labors by command of Clement. 
Sullenly and sadly he quarried marbles for the 
sacristy. Sadly and sullenly he used his chisel year 
by year, making the very stones cry that shame and 
ruin were the doom of his country. At last in 1534 
Clement died. Then Michael Angelo flung down 

See Gotti, pp. 150, 155, 158, 159, for the correspondence which 
passed upon the subject, and the various alterations in the plan. As 
in the case of all Michael Angelo's works, except the Sistine, only a 
small portion of the original project was executed. 



SACRISTY OF S. LORENZO. 415 

his mallet. The monuments remained unfinished, 
and the sculptor set foot in Florence no more/ 

The sacristy of S. Lorenzo was built by Michael 
Angelo and paneled with marbles to receive the 
sculpture he meant to place there.^ Thus the co- 
lossal statues of Giuliano and Lorenzo were studied 
with a view to their light and shadow as much as to 
their form ; and this is a fact to be remembered by 
those who visit the chapel where Buonarroti labored 
both as architect and sculptor. Of the two Medici, 
it is not fanciful to say that the £>uke of Urbino is 
the most immovable of spectral shapes eternalized 
in marble ; while the Duke of Nemours, more grace- 
ful and elegant, seems intended to present a contrast 
to this terrible thought-burdened form.^ The alle- 
gorical figures, stretched on segments of elhpses be- 
neath the pedestals of the two dukes, indicate phases 
of darkness and of light, of death and life. They are 

* Cosimo de' Medici found it impossible to induce him to return to 
Florence. See B. Cellini's Life, p. 436, for his way of receiving the 
Duke's overtures. 

^ See above, p. %T. 

^ Vasari names the gloomy statue called by the Italians // Pense- 
roso, 'Lorenzo, Duke of Urbino ;' the sprightly one, ' Giuliano, Duke of 
Nemours ; ' and this contemporary tradition has been recently con- 
firmed by an inspection of the Penseroso's tomb (see a letter to the 
Academy, March 13, 1875, by Mr. Charles Heath Wilson). Grimm, 
in his ' Life of Michael Angelo,' gave plausible aesthetic reasons why we 
should reverse the nomenclature ; but the discovery of two bodies be- 
neath the Penseroso, almost certainly those of Lorenzo and his sup- 
posed son Alessandro, justifies Vasari. Neither of these statues can be 
accepted as portraits. 



4i6 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

two women and two men; tradition names them 
Night and Day, Twilight and Dawning, Thus in 
the statues themselves and in their attendant genii 
we have a series of abstractions, symbolizing the 
sleep and waking of existence, action and thought, 
the gloom of death, the luster of life, and the inter- 
mediate states of sadness and of hope that form the 
borderland of both. Life is a dream between two 
slumbers ; sleep is death's twin-brother ; night is the 
shadow of death ; death is the gate of life — such is 
the mysterious mythology wrought by the sculptor 
of the modern world in marble. All these figures, 
by the intensity of their expression, the vagueness of 
their symbolism, force us to think and question. 
What, for example, occupies Lorenzo's brain ? Bend- 
ing forward, leaning his chin upon his wrist, placing 
the other hand upon his knee, on what does he for- 
ever ponder .^ The sight, as Rogers said well, ' fas- 
cinates and is intolerable.' Michael Angelo has shot 
the beaver of the helmet forward on his forehead, 
and bowed his head, so as to clothe the face in dark- 
ness. But behind the gloom there is no skull, as 
Rogers fancied. The whole frame of the powerful 
man is instinct with some imperious thought. Has 
he outlived his life and fallen upon everlasting con- 
templation ? Is he brooding, injured and indignant, 
over his own doom and the extinction of his race ? 
Is he condemned to witness in immortal immobility 



MEANING OF THE ALLEGORIES. 417 

the woes of Italy he helped to cause ? Or has the 
sculptor symbolized in him the burden of that per- 
sonality we carry with us in this life and bear for- 
ever when we wake into another world ? Beneath 
this incarnation of oppressive thought there lie, full- 
length and naked, the figures of Dawn and Twilight, 
Morn and Evening. So at least they are commonly 
called : and these names are not inappropriate ; for 
the breaking of the day and the approach of night 
are metaphors for many transient conditions of the 
soul. It is only as allegories in a large sense, com- 
prehending both the physical and intellectual order, 
and capable of various interpretation, that any of 
these statues can be understood. Even the Dukes 
do not pretend to be portraits : and hence in part 
perhaps the uncertainty that has gathered round 
them. Very tranquil and noble is Twilight : a giant 
in repose, he meditates, leaning upon his elbow, 
looking down. But Dawn starts from her couch, 
as though some painful summons had reached her 
sunk in dreamless sleep, and called her forth to 
suffer. Her waking to consciousness is like that of 
one who has been drowned, and who finds the return 
to life agony. Before her eyes, seen even through 
the mists of slumber, are the ruin and the shame of 
Italy. Opposite lies Night, so sorrowful, so utterly 
absorbed in darkness and the shade of death, that to 
shake off that everlasting lethargy seems impossible. 



4l8 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY, 

Yet she is not dead. If we raise our voices, she too 
will stretch her limbs and, like her sister, shudder 
into sensibility with sighs. Only we must not wake 
her ; for he who fashioned her has told us that her 
sleep of stone is great good fortune. Both of these 
women are large and brawny, unlike the Fates of 
Pheidias in their muscular maturity. The burden of 
Michael Angelo's thought was too tremendous to be 
borne by virginal or graceful beings. He had to 
make women no less capable of suffering, no less 
world-wearied, than his country. 

Standing before these statues, we do not cry, 
How beautiful ! We murmur, How terrible, how 
grand ! Yet, after long gazing, we find them gifted 
with beauty beyond grace. In each of them there is 
a palpitating thought, torn from the artist* s soul and 
crystallized in marble. It has been said that archi- 
tecture is petrified music. In the sacristy of S. 
Lorenzo we feel impelled to remember phrases of 
Beethoven. Each of these statues becomes for us 
a passion, fit for musical expression, but turned like 
Niobe to stone. They have the intellectual vague- 
ness, the emotional certainty, that belong to the 
motives of a symphony. In their allegories, left 
without a key, sculpture has passed beyond her old 
domain of placid concrete form. The anguish of in- 
tolerable emotion, the quickening of the consciousness 
to a sense of suffering, the acceptance of the inevita 



UNFINISHED STATUES, 419 

ble, the strife of the soul with destiny, the burden 
and the passion of mankind — that is what they con- 
tain in their cold chisel-tortured marble. It is open 
to critics of the school of Lessing to object that here 
is the suicide of sculpture. It is easy to remark that 
those strained postures and writhen limbs may have 
perverted the taste of lesser craftsmen. Yet if 
Michael Angelo was called to carve Medicean 
statues after the sack of Rome and the fall of Flor- 
ence — if he was obliged in sober sadness to make 
sculpture a fit language for his sorrow-laden heart — 
how could he have wrought more truthfully than 
thus.? To imitate him without sharing his emo- 
tions or comprehending his thoughts, as the soulless 
artists of the decadence attempted, was without all 
doubt a grievous error. Surely also we may regret, 
not without reason, that in the evil days upon which 
he had fallen, the fair antique Heiterkeit and Allge- 
meinheit were beyond his reach. 

Michael Angelo left the tombs of the Medici 
unfinished; nor, in spite of Duke Cosimo's earnest 
entreaties, would he afterward return to Florence 
to complete them. Lorenzo's features are but rough- 
hewn ; so is the face of Night. Day seems strug- 
gling into shape beneath his mask of rock, and 
Twilight shows everywhere the tooth-dint of the 
chisel. To leave unfinished was the fate of Michael 
Angelo — partly too, perhaps, his preference ; for he 



420 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

was easily deterred from work. Many of his mar- 
bles are only just begun. The two medallion Ma- 
don7zas, the Madonna and Child in S. Lorenzo, the 
Head of Brutus, the Bound Captives, and the Pieta 
in the Duomo of Florence, are instances of master- 
pieces in the rough. He loved to fancy that the 
form dwelt within the stone, and that the chisel dis- 
encumbered it of superfluity. Therefore, to his eye, 
foreseeing what the shape would be when the rude 
envelope was chipped away, the marble mask may 
have taken the appearance of a veil or mantle. He 
may have found some fascination in the incomplete- 
ness that argued want of will but not of art ; and a 
rough-hewn Madonna may have been to him what 
a Dryad still inclosed within a gnarled oak was to a 
Greek poet's fancy. We are not, however, justified 
in therefore assuming, as a recent critic has sug- 
gested, that Michael Angelo sought to realize a cer- 
tain preconceived effect by want of finish. There is 
enough in the distracted circumstances of his life 
and in his temper, at once passionate and downcast, 
to account for fragmentary and imperfect perform- 
ance; nor must it be forgotten that the manual 
labor of the sculptor in the sixteenth century was 
by no means so light as it is now. A decisive argu- 
ment against this theory is that Buonarroti's three 
most celebrated statues — the Pieta in S. Peter's, the 
Moses^?Si& the Dawn — are executed with the highest 



MICHAEL ANGELO'S ISOLATION, 421 

polish it is possible for stone to take.^ That he 
always aimed at this high finish, but often fell below 
it through discontent and ennui and the importunity 
of patrons, we have the best reason to believe. 

Michael Angelo had now reached his fifty-ninth 
year. Lionardo and Raphael had already passed 
away, and were remembered as the giants of a by- 
gone age of gold. Correggio was in his last year. 
Andrea del Sarto was dead. Nowhere except at 
Venice did Italian art still flourish ; and the mundane 
style of Titian was not to the sculptor's taste. He 
had overlived the greatness of his country, and saw 
Italy in ruins. Yet he was destined to survive 
another thirty years, another lifetime of Masaccio 
or Raphael, and to witness still worse days. When 
we call Michael Angelo the interpreter of the bur- 
den and the pain of the Renaissance, we must re- 
member this long, weary old age, during which in 
solitude and silence he watched the extinction of 
Florence, the institution of the Inquisition, and the 
abasement of the Italian spirit beneath the tyranny 
of Spain. His sonnets, written chiefly in this latter 

* The * Bacchus ' of the Bargello, the ' David,' the ' Christ ' of the 
Minerva, the ' Duke of Nemours,' and the almost finished ' Night ' 
might also be mentioned. His chalk drawings of the ' Bersaglieri,' the 
'Infant Bacchanals,' the 'Fall of Phaethon,' and the 'Punishment of 
Tityos,' now in the Royal Collection at Windsor, prove that even in 
old age Michael Angelo carried delicacy of execution as a draughts- 
man to a point not surpassed even by Lionardo. Few frescoes, again, 
were ever finished with more conscientious elaboration than those of 
the Sistine vault. 



422 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY, 

period of life, turn often on the thought of death. 
His love of art yields to religious hope and fear, 
and he bemoans a youth and manhood spent in 
vanity. Once when he injured his leg by a fall 
from the scaffolding in the Sistine Chapel, he re- 
fused assistance, shut himself up at home, and lay 
waiting for deliverance in death. His life was only 
saved by the forcible interference of friends. 

In 1534, a new Eurystheus arose for our Her- 
cules. The Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, a fox by 
nature and infamous through his indulgence for a 
vicious bastard, was made Pope under the name of 
Paul ni.^ Michael Angelo had shed luster on the 
reigns of three Popes, his predecessors. For thirty 
years the Farnese had watched him with greedy 
eyes. After Julius, Leo, and Clement, the time 
was now come for the heroic craftsman to serve 
Paul. The Pope found him at work in his bottega 
on the tomb of Julius ; for the ' tragedy of the mau- 
soleum ' still dragged on. The statue of Moses was 
finished. * That,' said Paul, ' is enough for one 
Pope. Give me your contract with the Duke of 
Urbino ; I will tear it. Have I waited all these 
years ; and now that I am Pope at last, shall I not 
have you for myself .f^ I want you in the Sistine 
Chapel.' Accordingly Michael Angelo, who had 

* See Varchi. at the end of the 'Storia Fiorentina,' for episodes in 
the life of Pier Luigi Farnese, and Cellini for a popular estimate of the 
Cardinal, his father. 



THE LAST JUDGMENT 423 

already made cartoons for the Last Judgment in 
the life of Clement, once more laid aside the chisel 
and took up the brush. For eight years, between 
1534 and 1542, he labored at the fresco above the 
high altar of the chapel, devoting his terrible genius 
to a subject worthy of the times in which he lived. 
Since he had first listened while a youth to the 
prophecies of Savonarola, the woes announced in 
that apocalypse had all come true, Italy had been 
scourged, Rome sacked, the Church chastised. And 
yet the world had not grown wiser ; vice was on the 
increase, virtue grew more rare.^ It was impossible, 
after the experience of the immediate past and 
within view of the present and the future, to con- 
ceive of God as other than an angry judge, vin- 
dictive and implacable. 

The Last Judgment has long been the most 
celebrated of Michael Angelo's paintings ; partly no 
doubt because it was executed in the plenitude of his 
fame, with the eyes of all Italy upon him ; partly 

^ This extract from Cesare Balbo's * Pensieri sulla Storia d'ltalia,' 
Le Monnier, 1858, p. 57, may help to explain the situation: 'E se 
lasciando gli uomini e i nomi grandi de' governanti, noi venissimo a 
quella storia, troppo sovente negletta, dei piccoli, dei piu, dei go- 
vernati che sono in somma scopo d'ogni sorta di governo , se, 
coir aiuto delle tante memorie rimaste di quell' secolo, noi ci adden- 
trassimo a conoscere la condizione comune e privata degli Italiani di 
queir eta, noi troveremmo trasmesse dai governanti a' governati, e ri- 
tornate da questi a quelli, tali universali scostumatezze ed immorality, 
tali fiacchezze e perfidie, tali mollezze e libidini, tali ozi e tali vizi, tali 
avvilimenti insomma e corruzioni, che sembrano appena credibili in 
una eta d' incivilmento cristiano.' 



424 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY, 

because its size arouses vulgar wonder, and its theme 
strikes terror into all who gaze on it Yet it is neither 
so strong nor so beautiful as the vault-paintings of 
the Sistine. The freshness of the genius that created 
Eve and Adam, unrivaled in their bloom of primal 
youth, has passed away. Austerity and gloom have 
taken possession of the painter. His style has hard- 
ened into mannerism, and the display of barren 
science in difficult posturing and strained anatomy 
has become willful. Still, whether we regard this 
fresco as closing the long series of Last Judgments 
to be studied on Italian church-walls from Giotto 
downward ; or whether we confine our attention, as 
contemporaries seem to have done, to the skill of its 
foreshortenings and groupings;^ or whether we ana- 
lyze the dramatic energy wherewith tremendous 
passions are expressed, its triumph is in either case 
decided. The whole wall swarms with ascending and 
descending, poised and hovering, shapes — men and 
women rising from the grave before the Judge, taking 
their station among the saved, or sinking with un- 
utterable anguish to the place of doom — a multitude 

* Vasari's description moves our laughter with its jargon about *at- 
titudini bellissime e scorti molto mirabili,' when the man, in spite of 
his honest and enthusiastic admiration, is so little capable of penetra- 
ting the painter's thought. Mr. Ruskin leaves the same impression 
as Vasari: he too makes much talk about attitudes and muscles in 
Michael Angelo, and seems to be on Vasari's level as to compre- 
hending him. The difference is that Vasari praises, Ruskin blames; 
both miss the mark. 



CONTEMPORARY CRITICISM. 425 

that no man can number, surging to and fro in dim 
tempestuous air. In the center at the top, Christ is 
rising from His throne with the gesture of an angry 
Hercules, hurling ruin on the guilty. He is such as 
the sins of Italy have made Him. Squadrons of an- 
gels, bearing the emblems of his passion, whirl around 
Him like gray thunder-clouds, and all the saints lean 
forward from their vantage-ground to curse and 
threaten. At the very bottom bestial features take 
the place of human lineaments, and the terror of 
judgment has become the torment of damnation. 
Such is the general scope of this picture. Of all its 
merits, none is greater than the delineation of un- 
certainty and gradual awakening to life. The 
middle region between vigilance and slumber, 
reality and dream, Michael Angelo ruled as his 
own realm ; and a painting of the Last Judgment 
enabled him to deal with this fxaraix^io'; anoro^ — this 
darkness in the interval of crossing spears — under 
its most solemn aspect. 

When the fresco was uncovered, there arose a 
general murmur of disapprobation that the figures 
were all nude. As society became more vicious, it 
grew nice. Messer Biagio, the Pope's master of 
the ceremonies, remarked that such things were 
more fit for stews and taverns than a chapel. The 
angry painter placed his portrait in Hell with a mark 
of infamy that cast too lurid light upon this prudish 



426 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY, 

speech. When Biagio complained, Paul wittily an- 
swered that, had it been Purgatory, he might have 
helped him, but in Hell is no redemption. Even 
the foul-mouthed and foul-hearted Aretino wrote 
from Venice to the same effect — a letter astounding 
for its impudence.^ Michael Angelo made no defense. 
Perhaps he reflected that the souls of the Pope him- 
self and Messer Biagio and Messer Pietro Aretino 
would go forth one day naked to appear before the 
Judge, with the deformities of sin upon them, as in 
Plato's Gorgias. He refused, however, to give clothes 
to his men and w^omen. Daniel da Volterra, who 
was afterward employed to do this, got the name of 
breeches-maker. 

We are hardly able to appreciate the Last 
Judgment ; it has been so smirched and blackened 
by the smoke and dust of centuries. And this is 
true of the whole Sistine Chapel.^ Yet it is here 
that the genius of Michael Angelo in all its terrible- 

* ' E possibile che voi, che per essere divino no7i degnate il con- 
sortia degli huomhii, haviate cio fatto nel maggior tempio di Dio ? 

In un bagno delitioso, non in un choro supremo si conve- 

niva il far vostro.' Those who are curious may consult Aretino's 
correspondence with Michael Angelo in his published letters (Parigi, 
1609), lib. i. p. 153 ; lib. ii. p. 9; lib. iii. pp. 45, 122 ; lib. iv. p. 37. 

"^ Braun's autotypes of the vault frescoes show what ravage the 
lapse of time has wrought in them, by the cracking of the plaster, the 
peeling off in places of the upper surface, and the deposit of dirt and 
cobwebs. Mr. Heath Wilson, after careful examination, pronounces 
that not only time but the willful hand of man, repainting and washing 
the delicate tint-coats with corrosive acids, has contributed to their 
ruin. 



BEYLE'S CRITIQUE, 427 

ness must still be studied. In order to characterize 
the impression produced by even the less awful of 
these frescoes on a sympathetic student, I lay my 
pen aside and beg the reader to weigh what Henri 
Beyle, the versatile and brilliant critic, penciled in 
the gallery of the Sistine Chapel on January 13, 
1807 : ^ ' Greek sculpture was unwilling to reproduce 
the terrible in any shape ; the Greeks had enough 
real troubles of their own. Therefore, in the realm 
of art, nothing can be compared with the figure of 
the Eternal drawing forth the first man from non- 
entity. The pose, the drawing, the drapery, all is 
striking ; the soul is agitated by sensations that are 
not usually communicated through the eyes. When, 
in our disastrous retreat from Russia, it chanced 
that we were suddenly awakened in the middle of 
the dark night by an obstinate cannonading, which 
at each moment seemed to gain in nearness, then all 
the forces of a man's nature gathered close around 
his heart ; he felt himself in the presence of fate, and, 
having no attention left for things of vulgar interest, 
he made himself ready to dispute his life with des- 
tiny. The sight of Michael Angelo's pictures has 
brought back to my consciousness that almost for- 
gotten sensation. Great souls enjoy their own 
greatness : the rest of the world is seized with 
fear and goes mad.' 

* * Histpire de la Peinture en Italic,' p. 332. 



428 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

After the painting of the Last Judgment, one 
more great labor was reserved for Michael An- 
gelo.^ By a brief of September, 1535, Paul III. 
had made him the chief architect as well as sculptor 
and painter of the Holy See. He was now called 
upon to superintend the building of S. Peter's, and 
to this task, undertaken for the repose of his soul 
without emolument, he devoted the last years of his 
life. The dome of S. Peter's, as seen from Tivoli 
or the Alban hills, like a cloud upon the Campagna, 
is Buonarroti's ; but he has no share in the fagade that 
screens it from the piazza. It lies beyond the scope 
of this chapter to relate once more the history of the 
vicissitudes through which S. Peter's went between 
the days of Alberti and Bernini.^ I can but refer 
to Michael Angelo's letter addressed to Barto- 
lommeo Ammanati, valuable both as setting forth 
his views about the structure, and as rendering the 
fullest and most glorious meed of praise to his old 
enemy Bramante.^ All ancient jealousies, even had 
they ever stirred the heart of Michael Angelo, had 
long been set at rest by time and death The one 
wish of his soul was to set a worthy diadem upon 



* That is not counting the frescoes of the Cappella Paolina in 
the Vatican, painted about 1 544, which are now in a far worse state 
even than the 'Last Judgment,' and which can never have done more 
than show his style in decadence. 

' See above, pp. 89-93. 

' See Gotti, p. 307, or ' Archivio Buonarroti,' p. 535. 



S, PETER'S AND OLD AGE. 429 

the mother-church of Christianity, repairing by the 
majesty of art what Rome had suffered at the 
hands of Germany and Spain, and inaugurating by 
this visible sign of sovereignty the new age of 
Catholicity renascent and triumphant. 

To the last period of Buonarroti's life (a space 
of twenty-two years between 1542 and 1564) we 
owe some of his most beautiful drawings — sketches 
for pictures of the Crucifixion made for Vittoria 
Colonna, and a few mythological designs, like the 
Rape of Ganymede, composed for Tommaso Cava- 
lieri. His thoughts meanwhile were turned more 
and more, as time advanced, to piety; and many 
of his sonnets breathe an almost ascetic spirit of 
religion.^ We see in them the old man regretting 
the years he had spent on art, deploring his enthusi- 
asm for earthly beauty, and seeking comfort in the 
cross alone. 

Painting nor sculpture now can lull to rest 
My soul, that turns to His great love on high 
Whose arms to clasp us on the cross were spread. 

It is pleasant to know that these last years were 
also the happiest and calmest. Though he had 
lost his faithful friend and servant Urbino ; though 
his father had died, an old man, and his brothers 
had passed away before him one by one, his nephew 

* I have reserved my translation of the sonnets that cast most 
light upon Michael Angelo's thought and feeling for an Appendix, 
No. II. 



430 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

Lionardo had married in Florence, and begotten 
a son called Michael Angelo. Thus he had the 
satisfaction of hoping that his name would endure 
and flourish, as indeed it has done almost to this 
very day in Florence. What consolation this thought 
must have brought him is clear to those who have 
studied his correspondence and observed the tender 
care and continual anxiety he had for his kins- 
men.^ Wealth now belonged to him : but he had 
never cared for money; and he continued to live 
like a poor man, dressing soberly and eating sparely, 
often taking but one meal in the day, and that of 
bread and wine.^ He slept Httle, and rose by night 
to work upon his statues, wearing a cap with a 
candle stuck in front of it, that he might see where 
to drive the chisel home. During his whole life 

^ The majority of Michael Angelo's letters are written on do- 
mestic matters — about the affairs of his brothers and his father. 
When they vexed him, he would break out into expressions like 
the following : ' lo son ito, da dodici anni in qua, tapinando per 
tutta Italia ; sopportato ogni vergognia ; patito ogni stento ; lacerato 
il corpo mio in ogni fatica ; messa la vita propria a mille pericoli, solo 
per aiutar la casa mia.' They are generally full of good counsel and 
sound love. How he loved his father may be seen in the terza rima 
poem on his death in 1534. 

"^ Notice this expression in a letter to his father, written from Rome, 
about 1512 : ' Bastivi avere del pane, e vivete ben con Cristo e povera- 
mente ; come fo io qua, che vivo meschinamente.' It does not seem 
that he ever altered this poor way of living. For his hiring at Bologna, 
in 1507, a single room with one bed in it, for himself and his three 
workmen, see Gotti, p. 58. His father in 1500 rebuked him for the 
meanness of his establishment ; ibid. p. 23. It appears that he was 
always sending money home. 



PERSONAL QUALITIES. 431 

he had been solitary, partly by preference, partly 
by devotion to his art, and partly because he kept 
men at a distance by his manner.^ Not that Mi- 
chael Angelo was sour or haughty ; but he spoke 
his mind out very plainly, had no tolerance for 
fools, and was apt to fly into passions.^ Time had 
now softened his temper and removed all causes 
of discouragement. He had survived every rival, 
and the world was convinced of his supremacy. 
Princes courted him ; the Count of Canossa was 
proud to claim him for a kinsman ; strangers, when 
they visited Rome, were eager to behold in him its 
greatest living wonder.^ His old age was the serene 
and splendid evening of a toilsome day. But better 

* * lo sto qua in grande afanno, e con grandissima fatica di corpo, e 
non 6 amici di nessuna sorte, e none voglio : e non 6 tanto tempo che 
io possa mangiare el bisognio mio.' Letter to Gismondo, published by 
Grimm. See, too, Sebastian del Piombo's letter to him of November 9, 
1520: *Ma fate paura a ognuno, insino a' papi.' Compare, too, the 
letter of Sebastian, Oct, 15, 1512, in which Julius is reported to have 
said, ' E terribile, come tu vedi, nonse pol praticar con lui.' Again, 
Michael Angelo writes : ' Sto sempe solo, vo poco attomo e non parlo 
a persona e massino di fiorentini.' Gotti, p. 255. 

* When any thing went wrong with him, he became moody and ve- 
hement : ' Non vi maravigliate che io vi abbi scritto alle volte cosi 
stizosamente, che io 6 alle volte di gran passione, per molte cagioni che 
avengono a chi e fuor di casa.' So he writes to his father in 1498. A 
letter to Luigi del Riccio of 1 545 is signed ' Michelagnolo Buonarroti 
non pittore, ne scultore, ne architettore, ma quel che voi volete, ma 
none briaco, come vi dissi, in casa.' 

^ See the letters of Cosimo de' Medici, Gotti, pp. 301-313, the 
letter of Count Alessandro da Canossa, ibid. p. 4, and Pier Vettori's 
letter to Borghini, about the visit of some German gentlemen, ibid. 
p. 315- 



432 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY, 

than all this, he now enjoyed both love and 
friendship. 

If Michael Angelo could ever have been hand- 
some is more than doubtful. Early in his youth 
the quarrelsome and vain Torrigiani broke his nose 
with a blow of the fist, when they were drawing 
from Masaccio's frescoes in the Carmine together.* 
Thenceforth the artistes soul looked forth from a 
sad face, with small gray eyes, flat nostrils, and 
rugged weight of jutting brows. Good care was 
thus taken that light love should not trifle with 
the man who was destined to be the prophet of 
his age in art. Like Beethoven, he united a loving 
nature, sensitive to beauty and desirous of affection, 
with a rude exterior. He seemed incapable of 
attaching himself to any merely mortal object, and 
wedded the ideal. In that century of intrigue and 
amour, we hear of nothing to imply that Michael 
Angelo was a lover till he reached the age of sixty. 
How he may have loved in the earlier periods of 
his life, whereof no record now remains, can only 
be guessed from the tenderness and passion out- 
poured in the poems of his latter years. That 
his morality was pure and his converse without 
stain is emphatically witnessed by both Vasari and 
Condivi.^ But that his emotion was intense, and 

* See the story as told by Torrigiani himself in Cellini, ed. Le Mon- 
nier, p. 23. 

* After saying that he talked of love like Plato, Condivi continues : 



VITTORIA COLONNA. 433 

that to beauty in all its human forms he was 
throughout his Hfe a slave, we have his own son- 
nets to prove. 

In the year 1534 he first became acquainted 
with the noble lady Vittoria, daughter of Fabrizio 
Colonna, and widow of the Marquis of Pescara. 
She was then aged forty-four, and had nine years 
survived the loss of a husband she never ceased 
to idolize.^ Living in retirement in Rome, she em- 
ployed her leisure with philosophy and poetry. 
Artists and men of letters were admitted to her 
society. Among the subjects she had most at heart 
was the reform of the Church and the restoration 
of religion to its evangelical purity. Between her 
and Michael Angelo a tender affection sprang up, 
based upon the sympathy of ardent and high-seeking 
natures. If love be the right name for this exalted 
and yet fervid attachment, Michael Angelo may 
be said to have loved her with all the pent-up 
forces of his heart. None of his works display a 
predilection for girlish beauty, and it is probable 
that her intellectual distinction and mature woman- 

* Non sent! mai uscir di quella bocca se non parole onestissime, e che 
avevan forza d'estinguere nella gioventu ogni incomposto e sfrenato 
desiderio che in lei potesse cadere.* Compare Scipione Ammirato, 
quoted by Guasti, Le Rime, p. xi, 

' Her intense affection for the Marquis of Pescara, to whom she 
had been betrothed by her father at the age of five, is sufficiently 
proved by those many sonnets and canzoni in which she speaks of him 
as her Sun. 



434 RENAISSANCE IN ITAL V, 

hood touched him even more than if she had been 
younger. When they were together in Rome they 
met frequently for conversation on the themes of 
art and piety they both held dear. Of these dis- 
courses a charming record has been preserved to 
us by the painter Francis of Holland.^ When they 
were separated they exchanged poems and wrote 
letters, some of which remain. On the death oi 
Vittoria, in 1547, the light of life seemed to be 
extinguished for our sculptor. It is said that he 
waited by her bedside, and kissed her hand when 
she was dying. The sonnets he afterward composed 
show that his soul followed her to heaven. 

Another friend whom Michael Angelo found in 
this last stage of life, and whom he loved with only 
less warmth than Vittoria, was a young Roman 
of perfect beauty and of winning manners. Tom- 
maso Cavalieri must be mentioned next to the 
Marchioness of Pescara as the being who bound 
this greatest soul a captive.^ Both Cavalieri and 
Vittoria are said to have been painted by him. and 
these are the only two portraits he is reported to 

* See Grimm, vol. ii. 

' See the Sonnets translated in my Appendix. See also the letters 
to Cavalieri, quoted by Gotti, pp. 231, 232, 234. It is surely strained 
criticism to conjecture, as Gotti has done, that these epistles were 
meant for Vittoria, though written to Cavalieri. Taken together with 
the sonnets and the letter of Bartolommeo Angiolini (Gotti, p. 233), 
they seem to me to prove only Michael Angelo's warm love for this 
young man. 



TOMMASO CAVALIERI. 435 

have executed. It may here be remarked that 
nothing is more characteristic of his genius than 
the determination to see through nature, to pass 
beyond the actual to the abstract, and to use reahty 
only as a stepping-stone to the ideal. This artistic 
Platonism was the source both of his greatness and 
his mannerism. As men choose to follow Blake 
or Ruskin, they may praise or blame him ; yet 
blame and praise pronounced on such a matter 
with regard to such a man are equally impertinent 
and insignificant. It is enough for the critic to 
note with reverence that thus and thus the spirit 
that was in him worked and moved. 

When we read the sonnets addressed to Vittoria 
Colonna and Cavalieri we find a something inex- 
pressibly pathetic in this pure and fervent worship 
of beauty, when the artist with a soul still young had 
reached the limit of the years of man. Here and 
there we trace in them an echo of his youth. The 
Platonic dialogues he heard while yet a young man 
at the suppers of Lorenzo reappear converted to the 
very substance of his thought and style. At the 
same time Savonarola resumes ascendency over his 
mind ; and when he turns to Florence, it is of Dante 
that he speaks. 

At last the moment came v/hen this strong soli- 
tary spirit, much suffering and much loving, had to 
render its account. It appears from a letter written 



436 RENAISSANCE IN ITAL V. 

to Lionardo Buonarroti on February 15, 1564, that 
his old servant Antonio del Francese, the successor 
of Urhino in his household, together with Tommaso 
Cavalieri and Daniello Ricciarelli of Volterra, at- 
tended him in his last illness. On the i8th of that 
month, having bequeathed his soul to God, his body 
to the earth, and his worldly goods to his kinsfolk, 
praying them on their death-bed to think upon 
Christ's passion, he breathed his last. His corpse 
was transported to Florence, and buried in the 
church of S. Croce with great pomp and honor by 
the Duke, the city, and the Florentine Academy. 



CHAPTER IX 

LIFE OF BENVENUTO CELLINI 

His Fame — His Autobiography — Its Value for the Student of History, 
Manners, and Character, in the Renaissance — Birth, Parentage, and 
Boyhood — Flute-playing — Apprenticeship to Marcone — Wander- 
jahr — The Goldsmith's Trade at Florence — Torrigiani and Eng- 
land — Cellini leaves Florence for Rome — Quarrel with the Guas- 
conti — Homicidal Fury — Cellini a Law to himself — Three Periods 
in his Manhood — Life in Rome — Diego at the Banquet — Renais- 
sance Feeling for Physical Beauty — Sack of Rome — Miracles in 
Cellini's Life— His Affections — Murder of his Brother's Assassin — 
Sanctuary — Pardon and Absolution — Incantation in the Colosseum 
— First Visit to France — Adventures on the Way — Accused of Steal- 
ing Crown Jewels in Rome — Imprisonment in the Castle of S. 
Angelo — The Governor — Cellini's Escape — His Visions — ^The Na- 
ture of his Religion — Second Visit to France — The Wandering Court 
— Le Petit Nesle — Cellini in the French Law Courts — Scene at Fon- 
tainebleau — Return to Florence — Cosimo de' Medici as a Patron — 
Intrigues of a petty Court — Bandinelli — The Duchess — Statue of 
Perseus — End of Cellini's Life — Cellini and Machiavelli. 

Few names in the history of ItaHan art are more 
renowned than that of Benvenuto Cellini. This can 
hardly be attributed to the value of his extant works ; 
for though, while he lived, he was the greatest gold- 
smith of his time, a skilled medalist, and an admi- 
rable statuary, few of his many masterpieces now 
survive. The plate and armor that bear his name 
are only in some rare instances genuine ; and the 



43^ RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

bronze Perseus in the Loggia de' Lanzi at Florence 
remains almost alone to show how high he ranked 
among the later Tuscan sculptors. If, therefore, 
Cellini had been judged merely by the authentic pro- 
ductions of his art, he would not have acquired a 
celebrity unique among his fellow-workers of the six- 
teenth century. That fame he owes to the circum- 
stances that he left behind him at his death a full and 
graphic narrative of his stormy life. The vivid style 
of this autobiography dictated by Cellini while en- 
gaged in the labor of his craft, its animated picture 
of a powerful character, the variety of its incidents, 
and the amount of information it contains, place it 
high both as a life-romance and also as a record of 
contemporary history. After studying the labored 
periods of Varchi, we turn to these memoirs, and 
view the same events from the standpoint of an 
artisan conveying his impressions with plebeian 
raciness of phrase. The sack of Rome, the plague 
and siege of Florence, the humiliation of Clement 
VII., the pomp of Charles V. at Rome, the beha- 
vior of the Florentine exiles at Ferrara, the inti- 
macy between Alessandro de' Medici and his 
murderer Lorenzino, the policy of Paul III., and 
the methods pursued by Cosimo at Florence, are 
briefly but significantly touched upon — no longer by 
the historian seeking causes and setting forth the 
sequence of events, but by a shrewd observer in- 



HIS MIXED CHARACTER, 439 

terested in depicting his own part in the great game 
of life. Cellini haunted the private rooms of popes 
and princes ; he knew the chief actors of his day, 
just as the valet knows the hero ; and the pic- 
turesque glimpses into their life we gain from him 
add the charm of color and reality to history. 

At the same time this book presents an admi- 
rable picture of an artist's life at Rome, Paris, and 
Florence. Cellini was essentially an Italian of the 
Cinque-cento. His passions were the passions of 
his countrymen ; his vices were the vices of his 
time; his eccentricity and energy and vital force 
were what the age idealized as virtu. Combining 
rare artistic gifts with a most violent temper and a 
most obstinate will, he paints himself at one time as 
a conscientious craftsman, at another as a desperate 
bravo. He obeys his instincts and indulges his ap- 
petites with the irreflective simplicity of an animal. 
In the pursuit of vengeance and the commission ot 
murder he is self-reliant, coolly calculating, fierce 
and fatal as a tiger. Yet his religious fervor is 
sincere ; his impulses are generous ; and his heart 
on the whole is good. His vanity is inordinate ; 
and his unmistakable courage is impaired, to North- 
ern apprehension, by swaggering bravado. 

The mixture of these qualities in a personality so 
natural and so clearly limned renders Cellini a most 
precious subject for the student of Renaissance life 



440 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY, 

and character. Even supposing him to have been 
exceptionally passionate, he was made of the same 
stuff as his contemporaries. We are justified in con- 
cluding this not only from collateral evidence and 
Jrom what he tells us, but also from the meed of 
honor he received. In Europe of the present day 
he could hardly fail to be regarded as a ruffian, a 
dangerous disturber of morality and order. In his 
own age he was held in high esteem and buried by 
his fellow-citizens with public ceremonies. A funeral 
oration was pronounced over his grave 'in praise 
both of his life and works, and also of his excellent 
disposition of mind and body.'^ He dictated the 
memoirs that paint him as bloodthirsty, sensual, and 
revengeful, in the leisure of his old age, and left 
them with complacency to serve as witness of his 
manly virtues to posterity. Even Vasari, whom he 
hated, and who reciprocated his ill-will, records that 
' he always showed himself a man of great spirit and 
veracity, bold, active, enterprising, and formidable 
to his enemies ; a man, in short, who knew as well 
how to speak to princes as to exert himself in his 
art' 

Enough has been said to prove that Celhni was 
not inferior to the average morality of the Renais- 
sance, and that we are justified in accepting his life 

' * In lode e onor della vita sua e opere d'esso, e buona disposizi- 
one della anima e del corpo.' ' La Vita di Benvenuto Cellini,' Firenze, 
Le Monnier, 1852. ' Documenti,' p. 578. 



BIRTH AND BOYHOOD. 441 

as a valuable historical document.^ To give a 
detailed account of a book pronounced by Horace 
Walpole ' more amusing than any novel/ received 
by Parini and Tiraboschi as the most delightful 
masterpiece of Italian prose, translated into German 
by Goethe, and placed upon his index of select 
works by Auguste Comte, may seem superfluous. 
Yet I can not afford to omit from my plan the most 
singular and characteristic episode in the private 
history of the Italian Renaissance. I need it for the 
concrete illustration of much that has been said in 
this and the preceding volumes of my work. 

Cellini was born of respectable parents at Flor- 
ence on the night of All Saints* Day in 1500, and 
was called Benvenuto to record his father's joy at 
having a son.^ It was the wish of Giovanni Cellini's 
heart that his son should be a musician. Benvenuto 
in consequence practiced the flute for many years 
attentively, though much against his will. At the 
age of fifteen so great was his desire to learn the 
arts of design that his father placed him under the 

* I do not by this mean to commit myself to the opinion that Cel- 
lini is accurate in details or truthful. On the contrary, it is impos- 
sible to read his life without feeling that his vanity and self-esteem 
led him to exaggeration and misstatement. The value of the biog- 
raphy consists in its picturesqueness, its brilliant and faithful color- 
ing, and its unconscious self-revelation of an energetic character. 

^ With regard to his pedigree Cellini tells a ridiculous story about 
a certain Fiorino da Cellino, one of Julius Caesar's captains, who gave 
his name to Florence. For the arms of the Cellini family, see lib. i. 
cap. 50. 



442 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY, 

care of the goldsmith Marcone. At the same time 
he tells us in his memoirs : ' I continued to play 
sometimes through complaisance to my father either 
upon the flute or the horn ; and I constantly drew 
tears and deep sighs from him every time he heard 
me.' While engaged in the workshop of Marcone, 
Benvenuto came to blows with some young men 
who had attacked his brother, and was obliged to 
leave Florence for a time. At this period he visited 
Siena, Bologna, and Pisa, gaining his livelihood by 
working in the shops of goldsmiths, and steadily 
advancing in his art. 

It must not be thought that this education was 
a mean one for so great an artist. Painting and 
sculpture in Italy were regarded as trades, and 
the artist had his bottega just as much as the cobbler 
or the blacksmith.^ I have already had occasion 
to point out that an apprenticeship to goldsmith's 
work was considered at Florence an almost in- 
dispensable commencement of advanced art-study.^ 

* To enlarge upon this point is hardly necessary ; or it would 
be easy to prove from documentary evidence that artists so emi- 
nent as Simone Martini, Gentile da Fabriano, Perugino, and Ghirlan- 
dajo kept open shops, where customers could buy the products of 
their craft from a highly-finished altar-piece down to a painted 
buckler or a sign to hang above the street-door. The commercial 
status of fine art in Italy was highly beneficial to its advancement, 
inasmuch as it implied a thorough technical apprenticeship for 
learners. The defective side of the system was apparent in great 
workshops hKC that of Raphael, who undertook painting-commis- 
sions quite beyond his powers of conscientious execution. 

' See above, p. 124. 



ORFEVRIA. 443 

BrunelleschI, Botticelli, Orcagna, Verocchio, Ghi- 
berti, Pollajuolo, Ghirlandajo, Luca della Robbia, all 
underwent this training before they applied them- 
selves to architecture, painting, and sculpture. As 
the goldsmith's craft was understood in Florence, it 
exacted the most exquisite nicety in performance as 
well as design. It forced the student to familiarize 
himself with the materials, instruments, and technical 
processes of art ; so that, later on in life, he was not 
tempted to leave the execution of his work to jour- 
neymen and hirelings.^ No labor seemed too mi- 
nute, no metal was too mean, for the exercise of the 
master-workman's skill ; nor did he run the risk of 
becoming one of those half-amateurs in whom ac- 
complishment falls short of first conception. Art 
ennobled for him all that he was called to do. 
Whether cardinals required him to fashion silver 
vases for their banquet-tables ; or ladies wished the 
setting of their jewels altered; or a pope wanted 
the enameled binding of a book of prayers ; or men- 
at-arms sent sword-blades to be damaskeened v/ith 
acanthus foliage ; or kings desired fountains and 
statues for their palace courts ; or poets begged to 
have their portraits cast in bronze ; or generals 

* See lib. ii. cap. 5, for the description of Francis I. visiting Cel- 
lini in his work-room. He finds him hammering away at the metal, 
and suggests that he might leave that labor to his prentices. Cellini 
replies that the excellence of his work would suffer if he did not do it 
himself. 



444 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

needed medals to commemorate their victories, oi 
dukes new coins for their mint ; or bishops ordered 
reHquaries for the altars of their patron saints ; or 
merchants sought for seals and signet-rings engraved 
with their device : or men of fashion asked for me- 
dallions of Leda and Adonis to fasten in their caps 
— all these commissions could be undertaken by a 
workman like CeUini. He was prepared for all 
alike by his apprenticeship to orfevria ; and to all he 
gave the same amount of conscientious toil. The 
consequence was that, at the time of the Renais- 
sance, furniture, plate, jewels, and articles of per- 
sonal adornment were objects of true art. The 
mind of the craftsman was exercised afresh in every 
piece of work. Pretty things were not bought, ma- 
chine-made, by the gross in a warehouse ; nor was 
it customary, as now it is, to see the same design re- 
peated with mechanical regularity in every house. 

In 1 518 Benvenuto returned to Florence and 
began to study the cartoon of Michael Angelo. He 
must have already acquired considerable reputation 
as a workman, for about this time Torrigiani invited 
him to go to England in his company and enter the 
service of Henry VHI. The Renaissance was now 
beginning to penetrate the nations of the North, and 
Henry and Francis vied with each other in trying 
to attract foreign artists to their capitals. It does 
not, however, appear that the English king secured 



TORRIGIANI. 445 

the services of men so distinguished as Lionardo da 
Vinci, II Rosso, Primaticcio, Del Sarto, and Cellini, 
who shed an artificial luster on the Court of France. 
Going to London then was worse than going to 
Russia now, and to take up a lengthy residence 
among questi diavoli . . . quelle bestie di quegli 
Inglesi, as Cellini pohtely calls the English, did not 
suit a Southern taste. He had, moreover, private 
reasons for disliking Torrigiani, who boasted of 
having broken Michael Angelo^s nose in a quarrel. 
* His words,' says Cellini, 'raised in me such a hatred 
of the fellow that, far from wishing to accompany 
him to England, I could not bear to look at him/ 
It may be mentioned that one of Cellini's best points 
was hero-worship for Michael Angelo. He never 
speaks of him except as quel divino Michel Agnolo^ 
il mio maestro, and extols la Bella maniera of the 
mighty sculptor to the skies. Torrigiani, as far as 
we can gather from Cellini's description of him, 
must have been a man of his own kidney and com- 
plexion : * he was handsome, of consummate assur- 
ance, having rather the airs of a bravo than a sculp- 
tor ; above all, his fierce gestures and his sonorous 
voice, with a peculiar manner of knitting his brows, 
were enough to frighten every one that saw him ; 
and he was continually talking of his valiant feats 
among those bears of Englishmen.' The story of 
Torrigiani's death in Spain is worth repeating. A 



446 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

grandee employed him to model a Madonna, which 
he did with more than usual care, expecting a great 
reward. His pay, however, falling short of his ex- 
pectation, in a fit of fury he knocked his statue to 
pieces. For this act of sacrilege, as it was deemed, 
to the work of his own brain and hand, Torrigiani 
was thrown into the dungeons of the Inquisition. 
There he starved himself to death in 1522 in order 
to escape the fate of being burned. This story helps 
to explain why the fine arts were never well devel- 
oped in Spain, and why they languished after the 
introduction of the Holy Office into Italy.^ 

Instead of emigrating to England, Benvenuto, 
after a quarrel with his father about the obnoxious 
flute-playing, sauntered out one morning toward the 
gate of S. Piero Gattolini. There he met a friend 
called Tasso, who had also quarreled with his 
parents ; and the two youths agreed, upon the mo- 
ment, to set off for Rome. Both were nineteen years 
of age. Singing and laughing, carrying their bundle 
by turns, and wondering * what the old folks would 
say,' they trudged on foot to Siena, there hired a 
return horse between them, and so came to Rome. 
This residence in Rome only lasted two years, which 
were spent by Cellini in the employment of various 
masters. At the expiration of that time he returned 

' See Yriarte, 'Vie d'un Gentilhomme de Venise,* p. 439, for a pro- 
cess instituted by the Inquisition against Paolo Veronese. 



HOMICIDAL TEMPER. 44} 

to Florence, and distinguished himself by the making 
of a marriage girdle for a certain Raffaello Lapac- 
cini.^ The fame of this and other pieces of jewelry 
roused against him the envy and malice of the elder 
goldsmiths, and led to a serious fray, in the course 
of which he assaulted a young man of the Guasconti 
family, and was. obliged to fly disguised like a monk 
to Rome. 

As this is the first of Cellini's homicidal quarrels, 
it is worth while to transcribe what he says about it. 
' One day as I was leaning against the shop of these 
Guasconti, and talking with them, they contrived 
that a load of bricks should pass by at the moment, 
and Gherardo Guasconti pushed it against me in 
such wise that it hurt me. Turning suddenly and 
seeing that he was laughing, I struck him so hard 
upon the temple that he fell down stunned. Then 
turning to his cousins, I said. That is how I treat 
cowardly thieves like you ; and when they began to 
show fight, being many together, I, finding myself 
on flame, set hand to a little knife I had, and cried, 
If one of you leaves the shop, let another run for the 
confessor, for a surgeon won't find any thing to do 
here.' Nor was he contented with this truculent 
behavior ; for when Gherardo recovered from his 
blow, and the matter had come before the magis- 

' He calls it * un chiavaquore di argento, il quale era in quei tempi 
chiamato cosi. Questo si era una cintura di tre dita larga, die alie 
spose novelle s' usava di fare.* 



448 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

trates, Cellini went to seek him in his own nouse 
There he stabbed him in the midst of all his 
family, raging meanwhile, to use his own phrase, 

* like an infuriated bull.' ^ It appears that on this 
occasion no one was seriously hurt ; but the affair 
proved perilous to Cellini, since it was a mere acci- 
dent that he had not killed more than one of the 
Guasconti. These affrays recur continually among 
the adventures recorded by Cellini in his Life. He 
says with comical reservation of phrase that he was 

* naturally somewhat choleric ;' and then describes 
the access of his fury as a sort of fever, lasting for 
days, preventing him from taking food or sleep, 
making his blood boil in his veins, inflaming his 
eyes, and never suffering him to rest till he revenged 
himself by murder or at least by blows. To enu- 
merate all the people he killed or wounded, or 
pounded to a jelly in public brawls or private quar- 
rels, in the pursuit of deliberate vendetta or under a 
sudden impulse of ungovernable rage, would take 
too long. We are forced by an effort to recall to 
mind the state of society at that time in Italy, in 
order to understand how it is that he can talk with 
unconcern and even self-complacency about his 
homicides. He makes himself accuser, judge, and 
executioner, and is quite satisfied with the goodness 
of his cause, the justice of his sentence, and the 

• * Si come un toro invelenito/ 



BULLYING BRAVADO, 449 

equity of his administration. In a sonnet written to 
Bandinelli, he compares his own victims with the 
mangled statues of that sculptor, much to his own 
satisfaction.^ 

There is the same callousness of conscience in 
his record of spiteful acts that we should blush to 
think of — stabs in the dark, and such a piece of 
revenge as cutting the beds to bits in the house 
of an innkeeper who had oifended him.^ Nor does 
he speak with any shame of the savage cruelty with 
which he punished a woman who was sitting to him 
as a model, and whom he hauled up and down his 
room by the hair of her head, kicking and beating 
her till he was tired.^ It is true that on this occa- 
sion he regrets having spoiled, in a moment of blind 
passion, the best arms and legs that he could find 
to draw from. Such episodes, to which it is impos- 
sible to allude otherwise than very briefly, illustrate 
with extraordinary vividness what I have already 
had occasion to say about the Italian sense ol 
honor at this period.^ 

The consciousness of physical courage and the 

* ' Living men have felt my blows ; those many maimed and muti- 
lated stones one sees attest to your disgrace: the earth hides my 
bad work.' See the lines quoted by Perkins, 'Tuscan Sculptors,' vol. 
ii. p. 140. 

"^ Lib. i. cap. 79, 

^ Lib. ii. cap. 34. The whole history of this woman Caterina, and 
of the revenge he took upon her and his prentice Paolo, is one of the 
most extraordinary passages in the life. 

* See 'Age of the Despots,' pp. 481-486. 



450 RENAISSANCE IN ITAL V. 

belief in his own moral superiority sustained 
Cellini in all his dangers and in all his crimes. 
Armed with his sword and dagger, and protected 
by his coat of mail, he was ready to stand against 
the world and fight his way towards any object 
he desired. When a man opposed his schemes 
or entered into competition with him as an artist, 
he swaggered up with hand on hilt and threat- 
ened to run him through the body if he did not 
mind his business. At the same time he attrib- 
utes the success of his own violence in quelling 
and maltreating his opponents to the providence 
of God. * I do not write this narrative,' he says, 
from a motive of vanity, but merely to return 
thanks to God, who has extricated me out of so 
many trials and difficulties ; who likewise delivers 
me from those that daily impend over me. Upon 
all occasions I pay my devotions to Him, call upon 
Him as my defender, and recommend myself to His 
care. I always exert my utmost efforts to extri- 
cate myself, but when I am quite at a loss, and all 
my powers fail me, then the force of the Deity 
displays itself — that formidable force which, unex- 
pectedly, strikes those who wrong and oppress 
others, and neglect the great and honorable duty 
which God has enjoined on them.' I shall have 
occasion later on to discuss Cellini's religious 
opinions; but here it may be remarked that the 
feeling of this passage . is thoroughly sincere and 



RESIDENCE IN ROME, 451 

consistent with the spirit of the times. The sepa- 
ration between religion and morality was complete 
in Italy.^ Men made their own God and wor- 
shiped Him ; and the God of Cellini was one 
who always helped those who began to help them- 
selves by taking justice into their own hands. 

From the date of his second visit to Rome in 
1523, Cellini's hfe divides itself into three periods, 
the first spent in the service of Popes Clement VI I. 
and Paul TIL, the second in Paris at the court 
of Francis, and the third at Florence under Cosimo 
de' Medici. 

On arriving in Rome, his extraordinary abilities 
soon brought him into notice at the Court. The 
Chigi family, the Bishop of Salamanca, and the 
Pope himself employed him to make various jewels, 
ornaments, and services of plate. In consequence 
of a dream in which his father appeared and 
warned him not to neglect music, under pain of 
the paternal malediction, he accepted a post in 
the Papal band. The old bugbear of flute-playing 
followed him until his father's death, and then we 
hear no more of it. The history of this portion 
of his life is among the most entertaining passages 
of his biography. Drawing the Roman ruins, shoot- 
ing pigeons, scouring the Campagna on a pony like 
a shaggy bear, fighting duels, prosecuting love. 

* See ' Age of the Despots,' pp. 462-465. 



452 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

affairs, defending his shop against robbers, skir- 
mishing with Moorish pirates on the shore by 
Cerveterra, stabbing, faUing ill of the plague and 
the French sickness — these adventures diversify 
the account he gives of masterpieces in gold and 
silver ware. The literary and artistic society of 
Rome at this period was very brilliant. Painters, 
sculptors, and goldsmiths mixed with scholars and 
poets, passing their time alternately in the palaces 
of dukes and cardinals and in the lodgings of gay 
women. Bohemianism of the wildest type was 
combined with the manners of the great world. 
A little incident described at some length by Cel- 
lini brings this varied life before us. There was 
a club of artists, including Giulio Romano and other 
pupils of Raphael, who met twice a week to sup 
together and to spend the evening in conversation, 
with music and the recitation of sonnets. Each 
member of this company brought with him a lady. 
Cellini, on one occasion, not being provided for 
the moment with an innamorata, dressed up a beau- 
tiful Spanish youth called Diego as a woman, and 
took him to the supper. The ensuing scene is 
described in the most vivid manner. We see be- 
fore us the band of painters and poets, the women 
in their bright costumes, the table adorned with 
flowers and fruit, and, as a background to the whole 
picture, a trellis of jasminjs with dark foliage and 



DIEGO, 453 

Starry blossoms. Diego, called Pomona, with re- 
gard doubtless to his dark and ruddy beauty, is 
unanimously proclaimed the fairest of the fair. Then 
a discovery of his sex is made ; and the adventure 
leads, as usual in the doings of Cellini, to daggers, 
midnight ambushes, and vendettas that only end 
with bloodshed. 

An episode of this sort may serve as the occa- 
sion for observing that the artists of the late Re- 
naissance had become absorbed in the admiration of 
merely carnal beauty. With the exception of 
Michael Angelo and Tintoretto, there was no great 
master left who still pursued an intellectual ideal. 
The Romans and the Venetians simply sought and 
painted what was splendid and luxurious in the 
world around them. Their taste was contented with 
well-developed muscles, gorgeous color, youthful 
bloom, activity of limb, and grace of outline. The 
habits of the day, voluptuous yet hardy, fostered 
this one-sided development of the arts ; while the 
asceticism of the Middle Ages had yielded to a 
pagan cult of sensuality. To draw un del corpo 
ignudo with freedom was now the ne plus ultra of 
achievement. How to express thought or to indi- 
cate the subtleties of emotion had ceased to be the 
artist's aim. We have already noticed the pas- 
sionate love of beauty which animated the great 
masters of the golden age. This, in the less ele- 



454 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY, 

vated natures of the craftsmen who succeeded them^ 
and under the conditions of advancing national cor- 
ruption, was no longer refined or restrained by 
delicacy of feeling or by loftiness of aim. It degen- 
erated into soulless animalism. The capacity for 
perceiving and for reproducing what is nobly beau- 
tiful was lost. Vulgarity and coarseness stamped 
themselves upon the finest work of men like Giulio 
Romano. At this crisis it was proved how inferior 
was the neo-paganism of the sixteenth century to 
the paganism of antiquity it aped. Mythology pre- 
served Greek art from degradation, and connected 
a similar enthusiasm for corporeal beauty with the 
thoughts and aspirations of the Hellenic race. The 
Italians lacked this safeguard of a natural religion. 
To throw the Christian ideal aside, and to strive to 
grasp the classical ideal in exchange, was easy. But 
paganism alone could give them nothing but its 
vices ; it was incapable of communicating its real 
source of fife — its poetry, its faith, its cult of nature. 
Art, therefore, as soon as the artists pronounced 
themselves for sensuality, merged in a skillful selec- 
tion and reproduction of elegant forms, and nothing 
more. A handsome youth upon a pedestal was 
called a god. A duke's mistress on Titian's canvas 
passed for Aphrodite. Andrea del Sarto's faithless 
wife figured as Madonna. Cellini himself, though 
sensitive to every kind of physical beauty — as we 



SACK OF ROME. 455 

gather from what he tells us of Cencio, Diego, 
Faustina, Paolino, Angelica, Ascanio — has not at- 
tempted to animate his Perseus, or his Ganymede, 
or his Diana of Fontainebleau with a vestige of 
intellectual or moral loveliness. The vacancy of 
their expression proves the degradation of an art 
that had ceased to idealize any thing beyond a fault- 
less body. Not thus did the Greeks imagine even 
their most sensual divinities. There is at least a 
thought in Faun and Satyr. Cellini's statues have 
no thought ; their blank animalism corresponds to 
the condition of their maker's soul.^ 

When Rome was carried by assault in 1527, and 
the Papal Court was besieged in the castle of S. 
Angelo, Cellini played the part of bombardier. It 
is well known that he claims to have shot the 
Constable of Bourbon dead with his own hand, and 
to have wounded the Prince of Orange ; nor does 
there seem to be any adequate reason for discrediting 
his narrative. It is certain that he was an expert 
marksman, and that he did Clement good service by 
directing the artillery of S. Angelo. If we be- 
lieved all his assertions, however, we should have to 
suppose that nothing memorable happened without 
his intervention. In his own eyes his whole life was 
a miracle. The very hailstones that fell upon his 

^ This might be further illustrated by analyzing Cellini's mode oi 
loving. He never rises above animal appetite. 



456 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY, 

head could not be grasped in both hands. His guns 
and powder brought down birds no other marksman 
had a chance of hitting. When he was a child, he 
grasped a scorpion without injury, and saw a sala- 
mander 'living and enjoying itself in the hottest 
flames.* After his fever at Rome in 1535, he 
threw off from his stomach a hideous worm — hairy, 
speckled with green, black, and red — the like where- 
of the doctors never saw.^ When he finally escaped 
from the dungeons of S. Angelo in 1539, a lumi- 
nous appearance like an aureole settled on his head, 
and stayed there for the rest of his life.^ These 
facts are related in the true spirit of Jerome Cardon, 
Paracelsus, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, and Sir 
Thomas Browne. Cellini doubtless believed in 
them ; but they warn us to be cautious in accepting 
what he says about his exploits, since imagination 
and self-conceit could so far distort his judgment. 

It may be regretted that Cellini has not given a 
fuller account of the memorable sack of Rome. Yet, 
confining himself almost wholly to his own adven- 
tures, he presents a very vivid picture of the sad 
life led by the Pope and cardinals, vainly hoping for 
succor from Urbino, wrangling together about the 

' Lib. i. cap. 85. 'Nel qual vomito mi usci dello stomaco im 
verme piloso, grande un quarto di braccio : e' peli erano grandi ed 
il verme era bruttissimo, macchiato di diversi colori, verdi, neri e 
rossi.' 

» Lib. i. cap. 128. 



DOMESTIC AFFECTION, 457 

causes of the tragedy, sewing the crown jewels into 
their doublets, and running the perils of the siege 
with common soldiers on the ramparts. When 
peace at last was signed, Cellini paid a visit to 
Florence, and found that his father and some other 
relatives had died of plague.^ His brother Cec- 
chino, however, who was a soldier in the Bande 
Nere of Giovanni de Medici, and his sister Lipe- 
rata survived. With them he spent a pleasant 
evening ; for Liperata having ' for a while lamented 
her father, her sister, her husband, and a little son 
that she had been deprived of, went to prepare 
supper, and during the rest of the evening there 
was not a word more spoken of the dead, but much 
about weddings. Thus we supped together with 
the greatest cheerfulness and satisfaction imagi- 
nable.' In these sentences there is no avowal of 
hard-heartedness ; only the careless familiarity with 
loss and danger, engendered by war, famine, plague, 
and personal adventures in those riotous times.^ 
Cellini gladly risked his life in a quarrel for his 
friends ; but he would not sadden the present by 
reflecting on inevitable accidents. This elastic temper 
permeates his character. His affections were strong, 
but transient. The one serious love-aifair he de- 

^ Notice, lib. i. cap. 40, p. 90, the dialogue between Cellini and the 
old woman, on his return to the paternal house : ' Oh dimmi, gobba 
perversa,' etc. 

" ' Per essere il mondo intenebrato di peste e di guerra,' is a phrase 
of Cellini's, i. 40, 



458 RENAISSANCE IN ITAL Y, 

scribes, among a multitude of mere debaucherieSj 
made him miserable for a few days. His mistress, 
Angelica, ran away, and left him ' on the point of 
losing his senses or dying of grief Yet, when he 
found her again, a short time sufficed to satisfy his 
longing, and he turned his back with gibes upon her 
when she bargained about money. 

It is worthy of notice that, at the same time, he 
was an excellent son and brother. His sister was 
left a widow with two children ; whereupon he took 
them all into his house, without bragging about 
what appears to have been the best action of his life. 
In the same spirit he conscientiously performed 
what he conceived to be his duty to Cecchino, mur- 
dered by a musketeer in Rome. After nursing his 
revenge till he was nearly mad, he stole out one 
evening and stabbed the murderer in the back.^ 
So violent was the blow that he could not extricate 
his dagger from the man's spine, but had to leave it 
sticking in his nape. Next to his own egotism the 
strongest feelings in Cellini were domestic ; and he 
showed them at one moment by charity to his 
sister s family, at another by a savage assassination. 

After killing the musketeer, Cellini retired for 
refuge to the house of Alessandro de' Medici, Duke 
of Civita di Penna, who had been his brother's 
patron. The matter reached the Pope's ears, for 

* Lib. L cap. SI. 



PROTECTION OF ASSASSINS, 459 

whom Benvenuto was at work upon crown jewels. 
Clement sent for him, and simply said : ' Now you 
have recovered your health, Benvenuto, take care of 
yourself/ This shows how little they thought of 
homicide in Rome. After killing a man, some 
powerful protector had to be sought, who was 
usually a cardinal, since the cardinals had right of 
sanctuary in their palaces. There the assassin lay in 
hiding, in order to avoid his victim's friends and rel- 
atives, until such time as a pardon and safe-conduct 
and absolution had been obtained from his Holiness. 
When Cellini, soon after this occurrence, stabbed a 
private enemy, by name Pompeo, two cardinals were 
anxious to screen him from pursuit, and disputed 
the privilege of harboring so talented a criminal.^ 
The Pope, with marvelous good-humor, observed : 
* I have never heard of the death of Pompeo, but 
often of Benvenuto's provocation ; so let a safe-con- 
duct be instantly made out, and that will secure him 
from all manner of danger.' A friend of Pompeo's 
who was present ventured to insinuate that this was 
dangerous policy. The Pope put him down at 
once by saying, 'You do not understand these 
matters ; I would have you know that men who are 
unique in their profession, like Benvenuto, are not 
s>ubject to the laws.' Whether Paul really said these 

* Lib. i. cap. 74. Clement was dead, and Paul III. had just been 
elected, 1 534. Paul sent Cellini a safe-conduct and pardon for Pom- 
peo's murder to Florence in 1535. Lib. i* cap. 8i. 



46o RENAISSANCE IN ITAL F. 

words may be doubted ; but it is clear that much 
was conceded to a clever workman, and that the 
laws were a mere brutuTn fulmen. No man of spirit 
appealed to them. Cellini, for example, was poisoned 
by a parish priest near Florence -} yet he never 
brought the man to justice ; and in the case of his 
own murders, he only dreaded the retaliation of his 
victim's kinsmen. On one occasion, indeed, the civil 
arm came down upon him : when the city guard 
attempted to arrest him for Pompeo's assassination. 
He beat them off with swords and sticks ; and after 
all, it appeared that they were only acting at the 
instigation of Pier Luigi Farnese, whom Benvenuto 
had offended. 

During his residence at Rome, Cellini witnessed 
an incantation conducted in the Colosseum by a 
Sicilian priest and necromancer. The conjurer and 
the artist, accompanied by two friends, and by a boy, 
who was to act as medium, went by night to the 
amphitheater. The magic circle was drawn ; fires 
were lighted, and perfumes scattered on the flames. 
Then the spirit-seer began his charms, calling in 
Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, or what passed for such, 
upon the leaders of the hosts of hell. The whole 
hollow space now filled with phantoms, surging up 
by legions, rushing down from the galleries, issuing 
from subterranean caverns, and wheeling to and 

^ Lib. ii. cap. 104. 



INC ANT A TION IN COL OSSE UM. 461 

fro with signs of fury. All the party, says Cellini, 
were thrown into consternation, except himself, who, 
though terribly afraid, kept up the fainting spirits of 
the rest. At last the conjurer summoned courage to 
inquire when Cellini might hope to be restored to 
his lost love, Angelica — for this was the trivial object 
of the incantation. The demons answered (how we 
are not told) that he would meet her ere a month 
had passed away. This prophecy, as it happened, 
was fulfilled. Then they redoubled their attacks ; the 
necromancer kept crying out that the peril was most 
imminent, until the matin bells of Rome swung 
through the darkness, freeing them at last from fear. 
As they walked home, the boy, holding the Sicilian 
by his robe and Benvenuto by his mantle, told them 
that he still saw giants leaping with fantastic gestures 
on their path, now running along the house roofs, 
and now dancing on the earth. Each one of them 
that night dreamed in his bed of devils.^ 

The interest of this incident is almost wholly 
picturesque. It throws but little light upon the 
superstitions of the age.^ The magnitude of the 
Colosseum, the popular legends concerning its magi- 
cal origin, and the terrible uses of blood to which it 

* Lib. i. cap. 64. 

' See, however, what is said about the mountain villages of 
Norcia being good for incantations. That district in Roman times 
was famous for such superstitions, Burckhardt, ' Die Cultur der 
Renaissance in Italian,' pp. 427-428, gives curious information on this 
topic. 



462 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY, 

had been put, invested this building with peculiar 
mystery. Robbers haunted the huge caves. Rub- 
bish and weeds choked the passages. Sickly trees 
soared up from darkness into light among the 
porches, and the moon peered through the empty 
vomitories. If we call imagination to our aid, and 
place the necromancers and their brazier in the 
center of this space ; if we fancy the priest's 
chanted spells, the sacred names invoked in his 
unholy rites, the shuddering terror of the con- 
science-stricken accomplices, and Cellini with defiant 
mien but quailing heart, we can well believe that he 
saw more than the amphitheater contained. Wheth- 
er the specters were projected by the conjurer from 
a magic lantern on the smoke that issued from his 
heaps of blazing wood, so that the volumes of 
vapor, agitated by the wind and rolling in thick 
spirals, showed them retreating and advancing, and 
varying in shape and number, is a matter for conjec- 
ture. Cellini firmly believed that he had been en- 
vironed by living squadrons of the spirits of the 
damned. 

The next four years were spent by Cellini chiefly 
in Rome, in peril of his life at several seasons, owing 
to the animosity of Pier Luigi Farnese. One journey 
he took at this period to Venice, passing through 
Ferrara, where he came to blows with the Florentine 
exiles. It is interesting to find the respectable his- 



JOURNEY TO FRANCE, 463 

torian Jacopo Nardi involved, if only as a peace- 
maker, in this affray.^ He also visited Florence and 
cast dies for Alessandro's silver coinage. It was 
here that he found opportunities of observing the 
perilous intimacy between the Duke of Civita di 
Penna and his cousin — quel pazzo malinconico 
filosofo di Lorenzino?' In April, 1537, having quar- 
reled with the Pope, who seems to have adopted 
Pier Luigi's prejudice against him, Cellini set out for 
France with two of his workmen. They passed 
through Florence, Bologna, Venice, and Padua, 
staying in the last place to model a medallion por- 
trait of Pietro Bembo ;^ then they crossed the 
Orisons by the Bernina and Albula passes. We 
hear nothing about this part of the journey, except 
that the snow was heavy, and that they ran great 
danger of their lives. Cellini must have traversed 
some of the most romantic scenery of Switzerland at 
the best season of the year ; yet not a word escapes 
him about the beauty of the Alps or the wonder of 
the glaciers, which he saw for the first time. The 



* Lib. i. cap. 'j^. 

^ Lib. i. cap. 88. 'That mad melancholy philosopher Lorenzino.* 
Cf. i. 80 and 81. ' Molte volte lo trovavo a dormicchiare dopo desinare 
con quel suo Lorenzino, che poi I'ammazzo, e non altri ; ed io molto mi 

maravigliavo che un duca di quella sorte cosi si fidava il duca, 

che lo teneva quando per pazzericcio, e quando per poltrone.' C£ 
again, cap. 89. 

' This glimpse of Bembo in his Paduan villa is very pleasing. Lib. 
i. cap. 94. 



464 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY, 

pleasure we derive from contemplating savage 
scenery was unknown to the Italians of the six- 
teenth century ; the height and cold, the gloom and 
solitude of mountains struck them with a sense of 
terror or of dreariness. On the Lake of Wallenstadt 
Cellini met with a party of Germans, whom he 
hated as cordially as an Athenian of the age of 
Pericles might have loathed the Scythians for their 
barbarism.^ The Italians embarked in one boat, 
the Germans in another ; Cellini being under the 
impression that the Northern lakes would not be so 
likely to drown him as those of his own country. 
However, when a storm swept down the hills, he 
took a terrible fright, and compelled the boatmen at 
the point of the poniard to put him and his com- 
pany ashore. The description of their struggles to 
drag their heavily-laden horses over the uneven 
ground near Wesen is extremely graphic, and gives 
a good notion of the dangers of the road in those 
days.^ That night they 'heard the watch sing at 
all hours very agreeably ; and as the houses of that 
town were all of wood, he kept bidding them to take 
care of their fires.* Next day they arrived, not with- 
out other accidents, at Zurich, ' a marvelous city, as 

* 'Quei diavoli di quei gentiluomini tedeschi.' This is, however, 
the language he uses about nearly all foreigners — Spaniards, French, 
and English. 

' Lib. i. cap. 96. ' lo ero tutto armato di maglia con i stivali grossi 
e con uno scoppietto in mano, e pioveva quanto Iddio ne sapeva man- 
dare,* etc. 



CHARGE OF THEFT, 465 

clear and polished as a jewel.' Thence by Solothurn, 
Lausanne, Geneva, and Lyons, they made their way 
to Paris. 

This long and troublesome journey led to noth- 
ing, for Cellini grew weary of following the French 
Court about from place to place ; his health too 
failed him, and he decided that he would rather die 
in Italy than France.* Accordingly he returned to 
Rome, and there, not long after his arrival, he was 
arrested by the order of Pope Paul 1 11.^ The charge 
against him, preferred by one of his own prentices, 
was this : During the siege of Rome, he had been 
employed by Clement to melt down the tiaras and 
papal ornaments, in order that the precious stones 
might be conveyed away in secrecy. He did so ; and 
afterward confessed to having kept a portion of the 
gold filings found in the cinders of his brazier during 
the operation. For this crime Clement gave him 
absolution.^ Now, however, he was accused of 
having stolen gold and jewels to the amount of 
nearly eighty thousand ducats. * The avarice of the 
Pope, but more that of his bastard, then called Duke 
of Castro,* inclined Paul to believe this charge ; and 
Pier Luigi was allowed to farm the case. Cellini was 
examined by the Governor of Rome and two assess- 
ors ; in spite of his vehement protestations of inno- 

* Lib. i. cap. 98 ' lb. cap. loi. 

' See lib. i. cap. 38, 43. 



466 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

cence, the absence of any evidence against him, and 
the sound arguments adduced in his defense, he was 
committed to the castle of S. Angelo. When he 
received his sentence, he called heaven and earth to 
witness, thanking God that he had * the happiness 
not to be confined for some error of his sinful 
nature, as generally happens to young men/ Where- 
upon * the brute of a Governor rephed. Yet you 
have killed men enough in your time.' This remark 
was pertinent ; but it provoked a torrent of abuse 
and a long enumeration of his services from the 
virtuous Cellini. 

The account of this imprisonment, and espe- 
cially of the hypochondriacal Governor who thought 
he was a bat and used to flap his arms and squeak 
when night was coming on, is highly entertaining.^ 
Not less interesting is the description of Cellini's 
daring escape from the castle. In climbing over the 
last wall, he fell and broke his leg, and was carried 
by a waterman to the palace of the Cardinal Cornaro. 
There he lay in hiding, visited by all the rank and 
fashion of Rome, who were not a little curious to 
see the hero of so perilous an escapade. Cornaro 
promised to secure his pardon, but eventually ex- 
changed him for a bishopric. This remarkable pro- 

' The Governor, perplexed by Cellini's vaunt that if he only tried 
he was sure he could fly, put him under strict guard, saying, ' Ben- 
venuto e un pipistrello contrafatto, ed io sono un pipistrello da 
dovero.' 



IMPRISONMENT, 467 

ceeding illustrates the manners of the Papal Court. 
The cardinal wanted a benefice for one of his 
followers, and the Pope wished to get his son's 
enemy once more into his power. So the two ec- 
clesiastics bargained together, and by mutual kind 
offices attained their several ends. 

Cellini with his broken leg went back to languish 
in his prison. He found the flighty Governor 
furious because he had 'flown away/ eluding his 
bat's eyes and wings. The rigor used toward 
him made him dread the worst extremities. Cast 
into a condemned cell, he first expected to be flayed 
alive; and when this terror was removed, he per- 
ceived the crystals of a pounded jewel in his food. 
According to his own account of this mysterious 
circumstance, Messer Durante Duranti of Brescia, 
one of Cellini's numerous enemies, had given a dia- 
mond of small value to be broken up and mixed 
with a salad served to him at dinner. The jeweler 
to whom this charge was intrusted kept the diamond 
and substituted a beryl, thinking that the inferior 
stone would have the same murderous properties. 
To the avarice of this man Cellini attributed his 
escape from a lingering death by inflammation of 
the mucous membrane.^ 

During his first imprisonment he had occupied 
a fair chamber in the upper turret of the castle. He 

* Lib. i. cap. 125. 



468 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

was now removed to a dungeon below ground where 
Fra Fojano, the reformer, had been starved to 
death. The floor was wet and infested with crawl- 
ing creatures. A few reflected sunbeams, slanting 
from a narrow window for two hours of the after- 
noon, was all the light that reached him. Here he 
lay, alone, unable to move because of his broken 
leg, with his hair and teeth falling away, and with 
nothing to occupy him but a Bible and a volume 
of Villani's Chronicles. His spirit, however, was 
indomitable ; and the passionate energy of the man, 
hitherto manifested in ungoverned acts of fury, 
took the form of ecstasy. He began the study 
of the Bible from the first chapter of Genesis, and, 
trusting firmly to the righteousness of his own cause, 
compared himself to all the saints and martyrs of 
Scripture, men of whom the world was not worthy. 
He sang psalms, prayed continually, and composed 
a poem in praise of his prison. With a piece of 
charcoal he made a great drawing of angels sur- 
rounding God the Father on the wall. Once only 
his courage gave way: he determined on suicide, 
and so placed a beam that it should fall on him like 
a trap. When all was ready, an unseen hand took 
violent hold of him, and dashed him on the ground 
at a considerable distance. From this moment his 
dungeon was visited by angels, who healed his 
broken leg and reasoned with him of religion. 

The mention of these visions reminds us that 



VISIONS IN THE DUNGEON. 469 

Cellini had become acquainted with Savonarola's 
writings during his first imprisonment.^ Impressed 
with the grandeur of the prophet's dreams, and 
exalted by the reading of the Bible, he no doubt 
mistook his delirious fancies for angelic visitors, 
and in the fervor of his enthusiasm laid claim to 
inspiration. One of these hallucinations is particu- 
larly striking. He had prayed that he might see 
the sun at least in trance, if it were impossible that 
he should look on it again with waking eyes. But, 
while awake and in possession of his senses, he 
was hurried suddenly away and carried to a room, 
where the invisible power sustaining him appeared 
in human shape, ' like a youth whose beard is but 
just growing, with a face most marvelous, fair, 
but of austere and far from wanton beauty.' In 
that room were all the men who had ever lived and 
died on earth ; and thence they two went together, 
and came into a narrow street, one side whereof was 
bright with sunlight. Then Cellini asked the angel 
how he might behold the sun ; and the angel pointed 
to certain steps upon the side of a house. Up these 
Cellini climbed, and came into the full blaze of the 
sun, and, though dazzled by its brightness, he gazed 
steadfastly and took his fill. While he looked, the 
rays fell away upon the left side and the disk shone 
like a bath of molten gold. This surface swelled, 

* lib. i. cap. 105. 



470 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY, 

and from the glory came the figure of a Christ upon 
the cross, which moved and stood beside the rays. 
Again the surface swelled, and from the glory came 
the figure of Madonna and her Child; and at the 
right hand of the sun there knelt S. Peter in his 
sacerdotal robes, pleading Cellini's cause ; and * full 
of shame that such foul wrong should be done to 
Christians in his house/ This vision marvelously 
strengthened Cellini's soul, and he began to hope with 
confidence for liberty. When free again, he modeled 
the figures he had seen in gold. 

The religious phase in Cellini's history requires 
some special comment, since it is precisely at this 
point that he most faithfully personifies the spirit of 
his age and nation. That he was a devout Catholic 
there is no question. He made two pilgrimages to 
Loreto, and another to S. Francis of Vernia. To 
S. Lucy he dedicated a golden eye after his recovery 
from an illness. He was, moreover, always anxious 
to get absolution from the Pope. More than this ; 
he continually sustained himself at the great crises 
of his hfe, when in peril of imprisonment, while 
defending himself against assassins, and again on 
the eve of casting his Perseus, by direct and pas- 
sionate appeals to God. Yet his religion had but 
little effect upon his life ; and he often used it as 
a source of moral strength in doing deeds repug- 
nant to real piety. Like love, he put it off and 



CELLINPS RELIGION. 471 

on quite easily, reverting to it when he found him- 
self in danger or bad spirits, and forgetting it again 
when he was prosperous. Thus in the dungeon of 
S. Angelo he vowed to visit the Holy Sepulchre 
if God would grant him to behold the sun. This 
vow he forgot until he met with disappointment at 
the Court of Francis, and then he suddenly deter- 
mined to travel to Jerusalem. The offer of a salary 
of seven hundred crowns restored his spirits, and 
he thought no more about his vow. 

While he loved his life so dearly and indulged 
so freely in the pleasures of this earth, he made 
a virtue of necessity as soon as death approached, 
crying, ' The sooner I am delivered from the prison 
of this world, the better ; especially as I am sure 
of salvation, being unjustly put to death.' His 
good opinion of himself extended to the certainty 
he felt of heaven. Forgetting his murders and 
debaucheries, he sustained his courage with devo- 
tion when all other sources failed. As to the 
divine government of the world, he halted be- 
tween two opinions. Whether the stars or Prov- 
idence had the upper hand he could not clearly 
say ; but by the stars he understood a power an- 
tagonistic to his will, by Providence a force that 
helped him to do what he liked. There is a similar 
confusion in his mind about the Pope. He goes to 
Clement submissively for absolution from homicide 



472 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

and theft, saying, ' I am at the feet of your Holi- 
ness, who have the full power of absolving, and I 
request you to give me permission to confess and 
communicate, that I may with your favor be re- 
stored to the divine grace/ He also tells Paul that 
the sight of Christ's vicar, in whom there is an awful 
representation of the divine Majesty, makes him 
tremble. Yet at another time he speaks of Clement 
being * transformed to a savage beast,' and talks of 
him as ' that poor man Pope Clement' ^ Of Paul he 
says that he ' believed neither in God nor in any 
other article of religion ; ' he sincerely regrets not 
having killed him by accident during the siege of 
Rome, abuses him for his avarice, casts his bastards 
in his teeth, and relates with relish the crime of 
forgery for which in his youth he v\/^as imprisoned in 
the castle of S. Angelo.^ Indeed, the Italians 
treated the Pope as negroes treat their fetishes. If 
they had cause to dislike him, they beat and heaped 
insults on him — like the Florentines who described 
Sixtus IV. as *leno matris suae, adulterorum minister, 
diaboli vicarius,* and his spiritual offspring as ' simo- 
nia, luxus, homicidium, proditio, haeresis.* On the 
other hand, they really thought that he could open 
heaven and shut the gates of hell. 

At the end of the year 1539, the Cardinal Ippo- 

' • II Papa diventato cosi pessima bestia,' lib. i. 58 ; ' II Papa entrato 
in un bestial furore,' ib. 60 ; * Quel povero uomo di Papa Clemente,' 
ib. 103. 

" Ib. 36, loi. III., 



COURT OF FRANCIS. 473 

lito d'Este appeared in Rome with solicitations from 
Francis I. that the Pope would release Cellini 
and allow him to enter his service.^ Upon this 
the prison door was opened. Cellini returned to 
his old restless life of violence and pleasure. We 
find him renewing his favonte pastimes — killing, 
wantoning, disputing with his employers, and work- 
ing diligently at his trade. The temporary saint 
and visionary becomes once more the bravo and 
the artist. A more complete parallel to the con- 
sequences of revivalism in Italy could not be found.^ 
Meanwhile the first period of his history is closed 
and the second begins. 

Cellini's account of his residence in France has 
much historical interest besides the charm of its 
romance. When he first joined the Court, he found 
Francis traveling from city to city with a retinue of 
eighteen thousand persons and twelve thousand 
horses. Frequently they came to places where no 
accommodation could be had, and the suite were 
lodged in wretched tents. It is not wonderful that 
Cellini should complain of the French being less 
civilized than the Italians of his time. Francis among 

^ The scene is well described, lib. i. 127. The Pope was wont to 
have a weekly debauch, and the cardinal chose this favorable 
moment for his appeal : ' Gli usava una volta la settimana di fare una 

crapula assai gagliarda, perche da poi la gomitava Allora il 

papa, sentendosi appressare all' ora del suo vomito, e perche la troppa 
abbundanzia del vino ancora faceva Tufizio suo, disse,' etc, 

"^ See ' Age of the Despots,' p. 619. 



474 RENAISSANCE IN ITAL Y. 

his ladies and courtiers, pretending to a knowledge of 
the arts, sauntering with his splendid train into the 
goldsmith's workshop, encouraging Cellini's violence 
with a boyish love of mischief, vain and flattered, 
peevish, petulant, and fond of show, appears upon 
these pages with a life-like vividness.^ When the 
time came for settling in Paris, the king presented 
his goldsmith with a castle called Le Petit Nesle, 
and made him lord thereof by letters of naturaliza- 
tion. This house stood where the Institute has since 
been built ; of its extent we may judge from the 
number of occupations carried on within its pre- 
cincts when Cellini entered into possession. He 
found there a tennis-court, a distillery, a printing 
press, and a factory of saltpetre . besides residents 
engaged in other trades. Cellini's claims were re- 
sisted. Probably the occupiers did not relish the 
intrusion of a foreigner. So he stormed the place 
and installed himself by force of arms. Similar 
violence was needed in order to maintain himself 
in possession; but this Cellini loved, and had he 
been let alone, it is probable he would have died of 
ennui. 

Difficulties of all kinds, due in part to his un- 
governable temper, in part to his ill-regulated life, 
in part to his ignorance of French habits, gathered 
round him. He fell into disfavor with Madame 

* See especially the visit to the Paris workshop, lib. ii. cap. 15, and 
the scene in the Gallery at Fontainebleau, ib. 41. 



AD VENTURES IN PARIS, 475 

d'Estampes, the mistress of the King ; and here it 
may be mentioned that many of his troubles arose 
from his inability to please noble women.^ Proud, 
self-confident, overbearing, and unable to command 
his words or actions, Cellini was unfitted to pay 
court to princes. Then again he quarreled with his 
brother artists, and made the Bolognese painter, 
Primaticcio, his enemy. After being attacked by 
assassins and robbers on more than one occasion, he 
was involved in two lawsuits. He draws a graphic 
picture of the French courts of justice, with their 
judge as grave as Plato, their advocates all chatter- 
ing at once, their perjured Norman witnesses, and the 
ushers at the doors vociferating Paix, paix, Satan 
allez, paix. In this cry Cellini recognized the 
gibberish at the beginning of the seventh canto of 
Dante's Inferno. But the most picturesque group 
in the whole scene presented to us is that made by 
Cellini himself, armed and mailed, and attended by 
his prentices in armor, as they walked into the 
court to browbeat justice with the clamor of their 
voice. If we are to trust his narrative, he fought 
his way out of one most dangerous trial by simple 
vociferation. Afterward he took the law, as usual, 
into his own hands. One pair of litigants were 
beaten ; Caterina was nearly kicked to death ; and 
the attorneys were threatened with the sword. 

' His quarrels, for example, with the Duchess of Florence. 



476 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

In the midst of these disturbances, CelHni began 
some important works for Francis. At Paris the 
King employed him to make huge silver candelabra, 
and at Fontainebleau to restore the castle gate. For 
the chateau of Fontainebleau Cellini executed the 
nymph in bronze, reclining among trophies of the 
chase, which may still be seen in the Louvre. It is a 
long-limbed, lifeless figure, without meaning — a snuff- 
box ornament enlarged to a gigantic size. Francis, 
who can not have had good taste in art, if what 
Cellini makes him say be genuine, admired these 
designs above the bronze copies of the Vatican 
marbles he had recently received. He seems to 
have felt some personal regard for Benvenuto, and 
to have done all he could to retain him in his service. 
The animosity of Madame d'Estampes, and a grudge 
against his old patron, Ippolito d'Este, however, 
determined the restless craftsman to quit Paris. 
Leaving his castle, his unfinished works, and other 
property behind him in the care of Ascanio, his 
friend and pupil, he returned alone to Italy. This 
step, taken in a moment of restless pique, was ever 
after regretted by Cellini, who looked back with 
yearning from Florence to the generosity of Francis. 

Cosimo de' Medici was indeed a very different 
patron from Francis. Cautious, little-minded, med- 
dling, with a true Florentine's love of bargaining 
and playing cunning tricks, he pretended to protect 



CELLINI AT FLORENCE. 477 

the arts, but did not understand the part he had 
assumed. He was always short of money, and 
surrounded by old avaricious servants, through whose 
hands his meager presents passed. As a connoisseur, 
he did not trust his own judgment, thus laying him- 
self open to the intrigues of inferior artists. Hence- 
forward a large part of Cellini's time was wasted in 
wrangling with the Duke's steward, squabbling with 
Bandinelli and Ammanati, and endeavoring to over- 
come the coldness or to meet the vacillations of his 
patron. Those who wish to gain insight into the 
life of an artist at Court in the sixteenth century 
will do well to study attentively the chapters devoted 
by Cellini to his difficulties with the Duchess, and 
his wordy warfares with Bandinelli.^ This atmos- 
phere of intrigue and animosity was not uncongenial 
to Benvenuto ; and as far as words and blows went, 
he almost always got the best of it. Nothing, for 
example, could be keener and more cutting than the 
very just criticism he made in Bandinelli's presence 
of his Hercules and Cacus, * Quel bestial buaccio 
Bandinello,' as he delights to name him, could do 
nothing but retort with vulgar terms of insult* 

^ Lib. ii. cap. 83, 84, 87, 70, 71. 

^ ' That beastly big ox, Bandinelli.' Cf. cap. 70 for the critique. 
It may be said here, in passing, that the insult of Bandinelli, ' Oh 
sta cheto, soddomitaccio,' seems to have been justified by Benvenuto's 
conduct, though of course he carefully conceals it in his memoirs. 
After the charge brought against him by Cencio, for instance, he 
thought it better to leave Florence. — lb. cap. 61, 62. 



478 RENAISSANCE IN ITAL V. 

The great achievement of this third period was 
the modehng and casting of the Perseus. No epi- 
sode in Cellini's biography is narrated with more force 
than the climax to his long-protracted labors, when 
^t last, amid the chaos and confusion of innumerable 
accidents, the metal in his furnace liquefied and filled 
the mold. After the statue was uncovered in the 
Loggia de' Lanzi, where it now stands, Cellini 
achieved a triumph adequate to his own highest ex- 
pectations. Odes and sonnets in Italian, Greek, and 
Latin were written in its praise. Pontormo and Bron- 
zino, the painters, loaded it with compliments. Cellini, 
ruffling with hand on hilt in silks and satins through 
the square, was pointed out to foreigners as the great 
sculptor who had cast the admirable bronze. It was, 
in truth, no slight distinction for a Florentine artist 
to erect a statue beneath the Loggia de' Lanzi in 
the square of the Signory. Every great event in 
Florentine history had taken place on that piazza. 
Every name of distinction among the citizens of 
Florence was connected with its monuments. To 
this day we may read the course of Florentine art 
by studying its architecture and sculpture ; and 
not the least of its many ornaments, in spite of 
all that may be said against it, is the Perseus of 
Cellini. 

Cellini completed the Perseus in 1554. His 
autobiography is carried down to the year 1562, 



CELLINI AND HIS AGE. 479 

when it abruptly terminates. It appears that in 
1558 he received the tonsure and the first ecclesias- 
tical orders ; but two years later on he married a 
wife, and died at the age of sixty-nine, leaving three 
legitimate children. He was buried honorably, 
and a funeral oration was pronounced above his bier 
in the Chapter House of the Annunziata. 

As a man, Cellini excites more interest than as 
an artist ; and for this reason I have refrained from 
entering into minute criticism of his few remaining 
masterpieces. It has been well said that the two 
extremes of society, the statesman and the crafts- 
man, find their point of meeting in Machiavelli and 
Cellini, inasmuch as both recognize no moral autho- 
rity but the individual will.^ The virtu extolled by 
Machiavelli is exemplified by Cellini. Machiavelli 
bids his prince ignore the laws ; Cellini respects no 
tribunal and takes justice into his own hands. The 
word conscience does not occur in Machiavelli's 
phraseology of ethics; conscience never makes a 
coward of Cellini, and in the dungeons of S. Angelo 
he is visited by no remorse. If we seek a literary 
parallel for the statesman and the artist in their 
idealization of force and personal character, we find 
it in Pietro Aretino. In him, too, conscience is ex- 
tinct ; for him, also, there is no respect of King or 
Pope ; he has placed himself above law, and substi- 

* Edgar Quinet, * Les Revolutions d'ltalie,' p. 358. 



48o RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

tuted his own will for justice. With his pen, as 
Cellini with his dagger, he assassinates ; his cynicism 
serves him for a coat of armor. And so abject is 
society, so natural has tyranny become, that he ex- 
torts blackmail from monarchs, makes princes trem- 
ble, and receives smooth answers to his insults from 
Buonarroti. These three men, Machiavelli, Cellini, 
and Aretino, each in his own line, and with tne 
proper differences that pertain to philosophic genius 
artistic skill, and ribald ruffianism, sufficiently indi- 
cate the dissolution of the social bond in Italy 
They mark their age as the age of adventurers, 
bandits, bullies, IshmaeHtes, and tyranta 



CHAPTER X. 

THE EPIGONI. 

Full Development and Decline of Painting — Exliaustion of the old 
Motives — Relation of Lionardo to his Pupils— His Legacy to the 
Lombard School — Bernardino Luini — Gaudenzio Ferrari — The De- 
votion of the Sacri Monti — The School of Raphael — Nothing left 
but Imitation — Unwholesome Influences of Rome — Giulio Romano 
— Michael Angelesque Mannerists — Misconception of Michael 
Angelo — Correggio founds no School — Parmigianino — Macchinisti 
— ^The Bolognese — After-growth of Art in Florence — Andrea del 
Sarto — His followers — Pontormo — Bronzino — Revival of Painting 
in Siena — Sodoma — His Influence on Pacchia, Beccafumi, Peruzzi 
— Garofalo and Dosso Dossi at Ferrara — The Campi at Cremona — 
Brescia and Bergamo — The Decadence in the second half of the 
Sixteenth Century — The Counter-Reformation — Extinction of the 
Renaissance Impulse. 

In the foregoing chapters I have not sought to 
write again the history of art so much as to keep in 
view the relation between Itahan art and the leading 
intellectual impulses of the Renaissance. In the 
masters of the sixteenth century — Lionardo, Raphael, 
Michael Angelo, Correggio, and the Venetians — the 
force inherent in the Italian genius for painting 
reached full development. What remained was but 
an after-bloom, rapidly tending to decadence. To 
surpass those men in their own line seemed impos- 
sible. What they had achieved was so transcendent 



482 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

that imitation satisfied their successors ; and if they 
refused imitation, originality had to be sought by 
deviating into extravagances. Meanwhile no new 
stock of thoughts had been acquired ; and students 
of history are now well aware that for really great 
art ideas common to the nation are essential. The 
motives suggested by mediaeval Christianity, after 
passing through successive stages of treatment in 
the quattrocento, had received the grand and humane 
handling of the golden age. The motives of revived 
paganism in like manner were exhausted, and at 
this time the feeling for antiquity had lost its primal 
freshness. It might seem superfluous to carry this 
inquiry further, when we have thus confessedly 
attained the culminating point of painting. Yet the 
sketch attempted in this volume would be incom- 
plete and liable to misinterpretation, if no account 
were taken of the legacy bequeathed to the next 
generation by the great masters. 

Lionardo da Vinci formed, as we have seen, a 
school at Milan. It was the special good fortune of 
his pupils that what he actually accomplished bore 
no proportion to the suggestiveness of his teaching 
and the fertility of his invention. Of finished work 
he left but little to the world ; while his sketches 
and designs, the teeming thoughts of his creative 
brain, were an inestimable heritage. The whole of 
this rich legacy of masterpieces, projected, but no^ 



LIONA EDO'S PUPILS, 483 

executed, was characterized by a feeling for beauty 
which has fallen to no other painter. When we ex- 
amine the sketches in the Royal Collection at Wind- 
sor, we perceive that the exceeding sense of loveli- 
ness possessed by Lionardo could not have failed to 
animate his pupils with a high spirit of art. At 
the same time the extraordinary variety of his draw- 
ing — sometimes reminding us of German method, 
sometimes modern in the manner of French and 
English draughtsmen — by turns bold and delicate, 
broad and minute in detail — afforded to his school 
examples of perfect treatment in a multiplicity of 
different styles. There was no formality of fixed 
unalterable precedent in Lionardo, nothing for his 
scholars to repeat with the monotony of mannerism. 
It remained for his disciples, each in his own 
sphere, with inferior powers and feebler intellect, to 
perpetuate the genius of their master. Thus the 
spirit of Lionardo continued to live in Lombardy 
after he was dead. There alone imitation was really 
fruitful, because it did not imply mere copying. 
Instead of attempting to give a fresh and therefore 
a strained turn to motives that had already received 
consummate treatment, Lionardo's successors were 
able to execute what he had planned but had not 
carried to completion. Nor was the prestige of his 
style so oppressive through the mass of pictures 
painted by his hand as to check individuality or to 



484 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY, 

prevent the pupil from working out such portions of 
the master's vein as suited his own talent. Each 
found enough suggested, but not used, to give his 
special faculty free scope. This is in fact the reason 
why the majority of pictures ascribed to Lionardo 
are really the production of his school. They have 
the excellence of original work, but not such excel- 
lence as Lionardo could have given them. Their 
completion is due, as searching criticism proves, to 
lesser men; but the conception belongs to the 
greatest. 

Andrea Salaino, Marco d'Oggiono, Francesco 
Melzi, Giovanni Antonio Beltraffio, and Cesare da 
Sesto are all of them skilled workmen, losing and 
finding their individuality, as just described, in the 
manner of their master. Salaino brings exquisite 
delicacy of execution ; d'Oggiono, wild and bizarre 
beauty ; Melzi, the refinements of a miniaturist ; 
Beltraffio, hard brilliancy of light and color ; Cesare 
da Sesto, somewhat of effeminate sweetness; and 
thus the qualities of many men emerge, to blend 
themselves again in what is Lionardo's own. It is 
surely not without significance that this metempsy- 
chosis of genius should have happened in the case of 
Lionardo, himself the magician of Renaissance art, the 
lover of all things double-natured and twin-souled. 

Two painters of the Lombard school, Bernardino 
Luini and Gaudenzio Ferrari, demand separate 



LUINI. 485 

notice. Without Lionardo it is difficult to say what 
Luini would have been : so thoroughly did he ap- 
propriate his teacher's type of face, and, in oil-paint- 
ing, his refinement. And yet Luini stands on his 
own ground, in no sense an imitator, with a genius 
more simple and idyllic than Da Vinci's. Little con- 
ception of his charm can be formed by those who 
have not seen his frescoes in the Brera and S. Mau- 
rizio Maggiore at Milan, in the church of the Angeli 
at Lugano, or in the pilgrimage church of Saronno. 
To the circumstance of his having done his best 
work in places hardly visited until of late years may 
in part perhaps be attributed the tardy recognition 
of a painter eminently fitted to be popular. Luini 
was essentially a fresco-painter. None, perhaps, of 
all the greatest Italian frescanti realized a higher 
quality of brilliancy without gaudiness, by the scale 
of colors he selected and by the purity with which 
he used them in simple combinations. His frescoes 
are never dull or heavy in tone, never glaring, never 
thin or chalky. He knew how to render them both 
luminous and rich, without falling into the extremes 
that render fresco-paintings often less attractive than 
oil-pictures. His feeling for loveliness of form was 
original and exquisite. The joy of youth found 
in Luini an interpreter only less powerful and even 
more tender than in Raphael. While he shared 
with the Venetians their sensibility to nature, he 



486 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY, 

had none of their sensuousness or love of pomp 
In idyllic painting of a truly great type I know ot 
nothing more delightful than his figures of young 
musicians going to the marriage-feast of Mary, 
nothing more graceful than the genius ivy-crowned 
and seated at the foot of the cross.^ The sentiment 
for naive and artless grace, so fully possessed by 
Luini, gave freshness to his treatment of conven- 
tional religious themes. Under his touch they ap- 
peal immediately to the most untutored taste, without 
the aid of realistic or sensational effects. Even S. 
Sebastian and S. Rocco, whom it is difficult to rep- 
resent with any novelty of attitude or expression, 
became for him the motives of fresh poetry, un- 
sought but truly felt.^ Among all the Madonnas 
ever painted his picture of Mary with the espaHer of 
white roses, and another where she holds the infant 
Christ to pluck a purple columbine, distinguish them- 
selves by this engaging spontaneity. The frescoes 
of the marriage of the Virgin and of S. Catherine 
carried by angels to Mount Sinai might be cited for 
the same quality of freshness and unstudied poetry.^ 
When the subject demanded the exercise of grave 
emotion, Luini rose to the occasion without losing 
his simplicity. The Martyrdom of S. Catherine and 

^ Frescoes in the Brera, and at Lugano. 

^ S. Maurizio, on the Screen, inner church. Lugano in the Angeli 
• In the Brera. See also the Madonna, with Infant Christ, S. 
|ohn, and a Lamb at Lugano. 



TENDERNESS AND TRUTH, 487 

the fresco of Christ after the Flagellation are two 
masterpieces, wherein the depths of pathos have 
been sounded, and not a single note of discord is 
struck.^ All harsh and disagreeable details are 
either eliminated or so softened that the general 
impression, as in Pergolese's music, is one of pro- 
foundest and yet sweetest sorrow. Luini's genius 
was not tragic. The nearest approach to a dramatic 
motive in his work is the figure of the Magdalen 
kneeling before the cross, with her long yellow hair 
streaming over her shoulders, and her arms thrown 
backward in an ecstasy of grief.'^ He did well to 
choose moments that stir tender sympathy — the piety 
of deep and calm devotion. How truly he felt them 
— more truly, I think, than Perugino in his best period 
— is proved by the correspondence they awake in us. 
Like melodies, they create a mood in the spectator. 

What Luini did not learn from Lionardo was the 
art of composition. Taken one by one, the figures 
that make up his Marriage of the Virgin at Saronno 
are beautiful ; but the whole picture is clumsily con- 
structed; and what is true of this may be said of 
every painting in which he attempted complicated 
grouping.^ We feel him to be a great artist only 

* Side chapel of S. Maurizio at Milan. These frescoes are, in my 
opinion, Luini's very best. The whole church is a wonderful monu- 
ment of Lombard art. 

^ * Crucifixion ' at Lugano. 

^ See, for example, the oil-paintings in the cathedral of Como, so 
fascinating in their details, so lame in composition, 



488 RENAISSANCE IN ITAL V, 

where the subject does not demand the symmetrical 
arrangement of many parts. 

Gaudenzio Ferrari was a genius of a different 
order, more robust, more varied, but less single- 
minded than Luini. His style reveals the influences 
of a many-sided, ill-assimilated education ; blending 
the manners of Bramantino, Lionardo, and Raphael 
without proper fusion. Though Ferrari traveled 
much, and learned his art in several schools, he, 
like Luini, can only be studied in the Milanese dis- 
trict — at his birthplace Varallo, at Saronno, Vercelli, 
and Milan. It is to be regretted that a painter of 
such singular ability, almost unrivaled at moments 
in the expression of intense feeling and the repre- 
sentation of energetic movement, should have lacked 
a simpler training, or have been unable to adopt a 
manner more uniform. There is a strength of wing 
in his imaginative flight, a swiftness and impetu- 
osity in his execution, and a dramatic force in his 
conception, that almost justify Lomazzo's choice of 
the eagle for his emblem. Yet he was unable to 
collect his powers, or to rule them. The distrac- 
tions of an age that had produced its masterpieces 
were too strong for him ; and what he failed to find 
was balance. His picture of the Martyrdom of 
S. Catherme, where reminiscences of Raphael and 
Lionardo mingle with the uncouth motives of an 
earlier style in a medley without unity of compose 



GAUDENZIO FERRARI. 489 

tkKi or harmony of coloring, might be chosen as a 
typical instance of great resources misapplied.^ 

The most pleasing of Ferrari's paintings are 
choirs of angels, sorrowing or rejoicing, some of 
them exquisitely and originally beautiful, all ani- 
mated with unusual life, and poised upon wings 
powerful enough to bear them — veritable * birds of 
God/^ His dramatic scenes from sacred history, rich 
in novel motives and exuberantly full of invention, 
crowd the churches of Vercelli; while a whole 
epic of the Passion is painted in fresco above the 
altar of S. Maria delle Grazie at Varallo, covering 
the wall from basement to ceiling. The prodi- 
gality of power displayed by Ferrari makes up for 
much of crudity in style and confusion in aim ; 
nor can we refuse the tribute of warmest admira- 
tion to a master who, when the schools of Rome 
and Florence were sinking into emptiness and bom- 
bast, preserved the fire of feeling for serious themes. 
What was deadly in the neo-paganism of the Re- 
naissance — its frivolity and worldliness, corroding 
the very sources of belief in men who made of art 
a decoration for their sensuous existence — had not 
penetrated to those Lombard valleys where Ferrari 
and Luini worked. There the devotion of the 
Sacri Monti still maintained an intelligence between 

* In the Brera. 

' Frescoes at Saronno and in the Sacro Monte at Varallo. 



490 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

the people and the artist, far more fruitful of results 
to painting than the patronage of splendor-loving 
cardinals and nobles.^ 

Passing from Lionardo to Raphael, we find ex- 
actly the reverse of what has hithe^o been noticed 
Raphael worked out the mine of his own thought 
so thoroughly — so completely exhausted the motives 
of his invention, and carried his style to such per- 
fection — that he left nothing unused for his followers. 
We have seen that he formed a school of subor- 
dinates in Rome who executed his later frescoes 
after his designs. Some of these men have names 
that can be mentioned — Giulio Romano, of whom 
more hereafter ; Perino del Vaga, the decorator of 
Genoese palaces in a style of over-blown but gor- 
geous Raphaelism ; Andrea Sabbatini, who carried 
the Roman tradition down to Naples; Francesco 
Penni, Giovanni da Udine, and Polidoro da Cara- 

^ The whole lake-district of Italy, where the valleys of Monte Rosa 
and the Simplon descend upon the plain of Lombardy, is rich in 
works of this school. At Luino and Lugano, on the island of San 
Giulio, and in the hill-set chapels of the Val Sesia, may be found 
traces of frescoes of incomparable beauty. One of these sites deserves 
special mention. Just at the point where the pathway of the Colma 
leaves the chestnut groves and meadows to join the road leading tc 
Varallo, there stands a little chapel, with an open loggia of round Re- 
naissance arches, designed and painted, according to tradition, by 
Ferrari, and without doubt representative of his manner. The har- 
mony between its colors, so mellow in their ruin, its graceful arcades 
and quiet roofing, and the glowing tones of those granite mountains, 
with their wealth of vineyards and their forests of immemorial chest- 
nut trees, is perfect beyond words. 



SCHOOL OF RAPHAEL, 491 

vaggio. Their work, even while superintended by 
Raphael himself, began to show the signs of deca- 
dence. In his Roman manner the dramatic element 
was conspicuous; and to carry dramatic painting 
beyond the limits of good style in art is unfortu- 
nately easy. The Hall of Constantine, left un- 
finished at his death, still further proved how little 
his pupils could do without him.^ When Raphael 
died, the breath whose might sustained and made 
them potent ceased. For all the higher purposes of 
genuine art, inspiration passed from them as color 
fades from eastern clouds at sunset, suddenly. 

It has been customary to account for this rapid 
decline of the Roman school by referring to the sack 
of Rome in 1527. No doubt the artists suffered 
at that moment at least as severely as the scholars ; 
their dispersion broke up a band of eminent painters, 
who might in combination and competition have 
still achieved great things. Yet the secret of their 
subsequent failure lay far deeper; partly in the full 
development of their master's style, already de- 
scribed ; and partly in the social conditions of Rome 
itself. Patrons, stimulated by the example of the 
Popes, desired vast decorative works; but they 
expected these to be performed rapidly and at a 

* This, the last of the Stanze, was only in part designed by Raphael. 
In spite of what I have said above, the ' Battle of Constantine,' planned 
by Raphael and executed by Giulio, is a grand example of a pupil's 
power to carry out his master's scheme. 



492 RENAISSANCE IN ITAL V. 

cheap rate. Painters, familiarized with the execu* 
tion of such undertakings, forgot that hitherto the 
conception had been not theirs but Raphael's. Mis- 
taking hand-work for brain-work, they audaciously 
accepted commissions that would have taxed the 
powers of the master himself. Meanwhile moral 
earnestness and technical conscientiousness were 
both extinct. The patrons required show and sen- 
sual magnificence far more than thought and sub- 
stance. They were not, therefore, deterred by the 
vacuity and poor conceptive faculty of the artists 
from employing them. What the age demanded 
was a sumptuous parade of superficial ornament, 
and this the pupils of Raphael felt competent to 
supply without much effort. The result was that 
painters who under favorable circumstances might 
have done some meritorious work became mere 
journeymen contented with the soulless insincerity 
of cheap effects. Giulio Romano alone, by dint of 
robust energy and lurid fire of fancy flickering amid 
the smoke of his coarser nature, achieved a triumph 
in this line of labor. His Palazzo del Te will 
always remain the monument of a specific moment 
in Renaissance history, since it is adequate to the 
intellectual conditions of a race demoralized but 
living still with largeness and a sense of grandeur. 

Michael Angelo formed no school in the strict 
sense of the word. Yet his influence was not the 



INFLUENCE OF MICHAEL ANGELO. 493 

less felt on that account, nor less powerful than 
Raphael's in the same direction. During his man- 
hood the painters Sebastian del Piombo, Marcello 
Venusti, and Daniele da Volterra had endeavored 
to add the charm of oil-coloring to his designs; 
and long before his death, the seduction of his 
mighty mannerism had begun to exercise a fatal 
charm for all the schools of Italy. Painters inca- 
pable of fathoming his intention, unsympathetic to 
his rare type of intellect, and gifted with less than 
a tithe of his native force, set themselves to reproduce 
whatever may be justly censured in his works. To 
heighten and enlarge their style was reckoned a 
chief duty of aspiring craftsmen ; and it was thought 
that recipes for attaining to this final perfection of 
the modern arts might be extracted without trouble 
from Michael Angelo's masterpieces. Unluckily, in 
proportion as his fame increased, his pecuHarities 
grew with the advance of age more manneristic and 
defined ; so that his imitators fixed precisely upon that 
which sober critics now regard as a deduction from 
his greatness. They failed to perceive that he owed 
his grandeur to his personality ; and that the audaci- 
ties which fascinated them became mere whimsical 
extravagances when severed from his terribilita and 
somber simphcity of impassioned thought. His 
power and his spirit were alike unique and uncom- 
municable, while the admiration of his youthful wor- 



494 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

shipers betrayed them into imitating the externals 
of a style that was rapidly losing spontaneity and 
sense of beauty. Therefore they fancied they were 
treading in his footsteps and using the grand manner 
when they covered church-roofs and canvases with 
sprawling figures in distorted attitudes. Instead of 
studying nature, they studied Michael Angelo's 
cartoons, exaggerating by their unintelligent disciple- 
ship his willfulness and arbitrary choice of form. 

Vasari's and Cellini's criticisms of a master they 
both honestly revered may suffice to illustrate the 
false method adopted by these mimics of Michael 
Angelo's ideal. To charge him with faults proceed- 
ing from the weakness and blindness of the deca- 
dence — the faults of men too blind to read his art 
aright, too weak to stand on their own feet without 
him — would be either stupid or malicious. If at the 
close of the sixteenth century the mannerists sought 
to startle and entrance the world by empty exhibi- 
tions of muscular anatomy misunderstood, and by a 
braggadocio display of meaningless effects — crowd- 
ing their compositions with studies from the nude, 
and painting agitated groups without a discernible 
cause for agitation — the crime surely lay with the 
patrons who liked such decoration, and with the 
journeymen who provided it. Michael Angelo him- 
self always made his manner serve his thought. We 
may fail to appreciate his manner and may be in- 



CORREGGIESQUE MANNERISM. 495 

capable of comprehending his thought ; but only 
insincere or conceited critics will venture to gauge 
the latter by what they feel to be displeasing in the 
former. What seems lawless in him follows the 
law of a profound and peculiar genius, with which, 
whether we like it or not, we must reckon. His 
imitators were devoid of thought and too indifferent 
to question whether there was any law to be obeyed. 
Like the jackass in the fable, they put on the dead 
lion's skin of his manner, and brayed beneath it, 
thinking they could roar. 

Correggio, again, though he can hardly be said 
to have founded a school, was destined to exercise 
wide and perilous influence over a host of manner- 
istic imitators. Francesco Mazzola, called II Par- 
migianino, followed him so closely that his frescoes 
at Parma are hardly distinguishable from the mas- 
ter's ; while Federigo Baroccio at Urbino endeav- 
ored to preserve the sensuous and almost childish 
sweetness of his style in its integrity.* But the real 
attraction of Correggio was only felt when the new 
barocco architecture called for a new kind of deco- 
ration. Every cupola throughout the length and 
breadth of Italy began then to be painted with rolling 
clouds and lolling angels. What the wits of Parma 
had once stigmatized as a ragout of frogs now 

* Baroccio had great authority at Florence in the seventeenth cen- 
tury, when the cult of Correggio had overspread all Italy. 



496 RENAISSANCE IN ITAL Y. 

seemed the only possible expression for celestial ec- 
stasy ; and to delineate the joy of heaven upon those 
multitudes of domes and semi-domes was a point of 
religious etiquette. False lights, dubious foreshort- 
enings, shallow colorings, ill-studied forms, and mo- 
tiveless agitation suited the taste that cared for gaudy 
brightness and sensational effects. The painters, for 
their part, found it convenient to adopt a mannerism 
that enabled them to conceal the difficult parts of 
the figure in feather-beds of vapor, requiring neither 
effort of conception nor expenditure of labor on 
drawing and composition. At the same time, the 
Caracci made Correggio's style the object of more 
serious study ; and the history of Bolognese painting 
shows what was to be derived from this master by 
intelligent and conscientious workmen. 

Hitherto, I have had principally to record the 
errors of artists copying the external qualities of 
their great predecessors. It is refreshing to turn 
from the epigoni of the so-called Roman school to 
masters in whom the flame of the Renaissance still 
burned brightly. Andrea del Sarto, the pupil of 
Piero di Cosimo, but more nearly related in style to 
Fra Bartolommeo than to any other of the elder 
masters, was himself a contemporary of Raphael 
and Correggio. Yet he must be noticed here ; 
because he gave new qualities to the art of Tuscany, 
and formed a tradition decisive for the subsequent 
history of Florentine painting. To make a just 



ANDREA DEL SARTO. A97 

estimate of his achievement is a task of no small 
difficulty. The Italians called him ' il pittore senza 
errori/ or the faultless painter. What they meant by 
this must have been that in all the technical require- 
ments of art, in drawing, composition, handling of 
fresco and oils, disposition of draperies, and feeling 
for light and shadow, he was above criticism. As a 
colorist he went further and produced more beau- 
tiful effects than any Florentine before him. His 
silver-gray harmonies and liquid blendings of hues 
cool, yet lustrous, have a charm peculiar to himself 
alone. We find the like nowhere else in Italy. And 
yet Andrea del Sarto can not take rank among the 
greatest Renaissance painters. What he lacked was 
precisely the most precious gift — inspiration^ depth 
of emotion, energy of thought. We are apt to feel 
that even his best pictures were designed with a 
view to solving an aesthetic problem. Very few 
have the poetic charm belonging to the S. John of 
the Pitti or the Madonna of the Tribune. Beauti 
ful as are many of his types, like the Magdalen in 
the large picture of the Pieta} we can never be sure 
that he will not break the spell by forms of almost 
vulgar mediocrity. The story that his wife, a worth- 
less woman, sat for his Madonnas, and the legends 
of his working for money to meet pressing needs, 
seem justified by numbers of his paintings, faulty 

' Pitti Palace. 



498 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

in their faultlessness and want of spirit. Still, after 
making these deductions, we must allow that Andrea 
del Sarto not unworthily represents the golden age 
at Florence. There is no affectation, no false taste, 
no trickery in his style. His workmanship is always 
solid ; his hand unerring. If nature denied him the 
soul of a poet and the stern will needed for escap- 
ing from the sordid circumstances of his life, she 
gave him some of the highest qualities a painter 
can desire — qualities of strength, tranquillity, and 
thoroughness, that in the decline of the century 
ceased to exist outside Venice. 

Among Del Sarto's followers it will be enough to 
mention Franciabigio, Vasari's favorite in fresco- 
painting, Rosso de' Rossi, who carried the Florentine 
manner into France, and Pontormo, the masterly 
painter of portraits.^ In the historical pictures of 
these men, whether sacred or secular, it is clear how 
much was done for Florentine art by Fra Barto- 
lommeo and Del Sarto independently of Michael 
Angelo and Lionardo. Angelo Bronzino, the pupil 
of Pontormo, is chiefly valuable for his portraits. 
Hard and cold, yet obviously true to life, they form a 
gallery of great interest for the historian of Duke 
Cosimo's reign. His frescoes and allegories illus- 

* Franciabigio's and Rosso's frescoes stand beside Del Sarto's in the 
atrium of the Annunziata at Florence. Pontormo's portraits of Cosimo 
and Lorenzo de' Medici in the Ufifizzi, though painted from busts and 
medallions, have a real historical value. 



IL SODOMA. 499 

trate the defects that have been pointed out in those 
of Raphael's and Buonarroti's imitators.^ Want of 
thought and feehng, combined with the presump- 
tuous treatment of colossal and imaginative subjects, 
renders these compositions inexpressibly chilling. 
The psychologist, who may have read a poem from 
Bronzino's pen, will be inclined to wonder how far 
this barren art was not connected with personal 
corruption.^ Such speculations are, however, apt to 
be misleading. 

Siena, after a long period of inactivity, received 
a fresh impulse at the same time as Florence. Gio- 
vanni Antonio Bazzi, or Razzi, called II Sodoma, 
was born at Vercelli about 1477. He studied in his 
youth under Lionardo da Vinci, training his own 
exquisite sense of natural beauty in that scientific 
school. From Milan, after a certain interval of time, 
he removed to Rome, where he became a friend 
and follower of Raphael. These double influences 
determined a style that never lost its own originality. 
With what delicacy and naivete, almost like a second 
Luini, but with more of humor and sensuousness, 
he approached historic themes may be seen in his 
frescoes at Monte Oliveto.^ They were executed 

^ The ' Christ in Limbo ' in S. Lorenzo at Florence, and the detesta- 
ble picture of ' Time, Beauty, Love, and Folly' in our National 
Gallery. 

"' ' Opere Burlesche,' vol. iii. pp. 39-46. 

^ Near Siena. These pictures are a series of twenty-four subjects 
from the life of S. Benedict. 



500 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

before his Roman visit, and show the facility of a 
most graceful improvisatore. One painting repre- 
senting the Temptation of Monks by Dancing Women 
carries the melody of fluent lines and the seduction 
of fair girlish faces into a region of pure poetry. 
These frescoes are superior to Sodoma's work in 
the Farnesina. Impressed, as all artists were, by 
the monumental character of Rome, and fired by 
Raphael's example, he tried to abandon his sketchy 
and idyllic style for one of greater majesty and full- 
ness. The delicious freshness of his earlier manner 
was sacrificed ; but his best efforts to produce a 
grandiose composition ended in a confusion of indi- 
vidually beautiful but ill-assorted motives. Like 
Luini, Sodoma was never successful in pictures re- 
quiring combination and arrangement. He lacked 
some sense of symmetry, and sought to achieve mas- 
siveness by crowding figures in a given space. When 
we compare his group oiS, Catherine Fainting under 
the Stigmata with the medley of agitated forms that 
make up his picture of the same saint at Tuldo's 
execution, we see plainly that he ought to have 
confined himself to the expression of very simple 
themes.^ The former is incomparable for its sweet- 
ness ; the latter is indistinct and wearying, in spite 
of many details that adorn it. Gifted with an ex- 
quisite feeling for the beauty of the human body 

^ In the church of S. Domenico, Siena. 



SIENESE PAINTERS. 501 

Sodoma excelled himself when he was contented with 
a single figure. His S. Sebastian, notwithstanding 
its wan and faded coloring, is still the very best 
that has been painted.^ Suffering, refined and spir- 
itual, without contortion or spasm, could not be 
presented with more pathos in a form of more sur- 
passing loveliness. This is a truly demonic picture 
in the fascination it exercises and the memory it 
leaves upon the mind. Part of its unanalyzable 
charm may be due to the bold thought of combining 
the beauty of a Greek Hylas with the Christian 
sentiment of martyrdom. Only the Renaissance 
could have produced a hybrid so successful, because 
so deeply felt 

Sodoma's influence at Siena, where he lived a 
picturesque life, delighting in his horses and sur- 
rounding himself with strange four-footed pets of all 
sorts, soon produced a school of worthy masters. 
Girolamo del Pacchia, Domenico Beccafumi, and 
Baldassare Peruzzi, though they owed much to the 
stimulus of his example, followed him in no servile 
spirit. Indeed, it may be said that Pacchia's paint- 
ings in the Oratory of S. Bernardino, though they 
lacked his siren beauty, are more powerfully com- 
posed ; while Peruzzi's fresco of Augustus and the 
Sibyl, in the church of Fontegiusta, has a monu- 

^ In the Uffizzi. See also Sodoma's ' Sacrifice of Isaac' in the ca- 
thedral of Pisa, and the ' Christ Bound to the Pillar ' in the Academy at 
Siena. 



502 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY, 

mental dignity unknown to Sodoma. Beccafumi is 
apt to leave the spectator of his paintings cold. 
From inventive powers so rich and technical excel- 
lence so thorough we demand more than he can 
give, and are therefore disappointed. His most in- 
teresting picture at Siena is the Stigmatization of 
S. Catherine, famous for its mastery of graduated 
whites. Much of the paved work of the Duomo 
is attributed to his design. Both Beccafumi and 
Peruzzi felt the cold and manneristic Roman style 
of rhetoric injuriously. 

To mention the remaining schools of Italy in 
detail would be superfluous. True art still flourished 
at Ferrara, where Garofalo endeavored to carry on 
the Roman manner of Raphael without the neces- 
sary strength or ideality, but also without the soul- 
less insincerity, of the mannerists. His best quality 
was coloring, gem-like and rich ; but this found little 
scope for exercise in the dry and labored style he 
affected. Dosso Dossi fared better, perhaps through 
having never experienced the seductions of Rome. 
His glowing color and quaint fancy give the attrac- 
tion of romance to many of his pictures. The Circe, 
for example, of the Borghese Palace, is worthy to 
rank with the best Renaissance work. It is per- 
fectly original, not even suggesting the influence of 
Venice by its deep and lustrous hues. No painting 
is more fit to illustrate the Orlando Innamorato, 



FERRARA, CREMONA, BRESCIA, 503 

Just SO, we feel in looking at it, did Dragontina show 
herself to Boiardo's fancy. Ariosto's Alcina belongs 
to a different family of magnificent witches. 

Cremona, at this epoch, had a school of painters, 
influenced almost equally by the Venetians, the Mi- 
lanese, and the Roman mannerists. The Campi 
family covered those grave Lombard vaults with 
stucco, fresco, and gilding in a style only just re- 
moved from the barocco} Brescia and Bergamo 
remained within the influence of Venice, producing 
work of nearly first-rate quality in Moretto, Roma- 
nino, and Lorenzo Lotto. Moroni, the pupil of 
Moretto, was destined to become one of the most 
powerful character painters of the modern world, 
and to enrich the studies of historians and artists 
with a series of portraits impressive by their 
fidelity to the spirit of the sixteenth century at 
its conclusion. Venice herself at this period was 
still producing masterpieces of the genuine Renais- 
sance. But the decHne into mannerism, caused by 
circumstances similar to those of Rome, was not far 
distant. 

It may seem strange to those who have visited 
the picture-galleries of Italy, and have noticed how 
very large a number of the painters flourished after 
1550, that I should have persistently spoken of the 

* The church of S. Sigismondo, outside Cremona, is very interest- 
ing for the unity of style in its architecture and decoration. 



504 RENAISSANCE IN ITALY. 

last half of the sixteenth century as a period of de- 
cadence. This it was, however, in a deep and true 
sense of the word. The force of the Renaissance 
was exhausted, and a time of relaxation had to be 
passed through before the reaction known as the 
Counter-Reformation could make itself felt in art. 
Then, and not till then, a new spiritual impulse pro- 
duced a new style. This secondary growth of 
painting began to flourish at Bologna in accordance 
with fresh laws of taste. Religious sentiments of a 
different order had to be expressed ; society had 
undergone a change, and the arts were governed by 
a genuine, if far inferior, inspiration. Meanwhile, 
the Renaissance, so far as Italy is concerned, was 
ended. 

It is one of the sad features of this subject, that 
each section has to end in lamentation. Servitude in 
the sphere of politics ; literary feebleness in scholar- 
ship ; decadence in art — to shun these conclusions is 
impossible. He who has undertaken to describe the 
parabola of a projectile can not be satisfied with trac- 
ing its gradual rise and determining its culminatioa 
He must follow its spent force, and watch it slowly 
sink with ever-dwindling impetus to earth. Intel- 
lectual movements, when we isolate them in a special 
country, observing the causes that set them in motion 
and calculating their retarding influences, may, not 
unreasonably, be compared to the parabola of a pro- 



DECLINE OF ART. 505 

jectile. To shrink from studying the decline of 
mental vigor in Italy upon the close of the Renais- 
sance would be therefore weak ; u.ough the task 
of tracing the impulse communicated by her pre- 
vious energy to other nations, and their stirring 
under a like movement, might be more agreeable* 



APPENDICES. 



APPENDIX I. 

The Pulpits of Pisa and Ravello, 

Having tried to characterize Niccola Pisano's relation to 
early Italian art in the second chapter of this volume, I 
adverted to the recent doubts which have been thrown by 
very competent authorities upon Vasari's legend of this 
master. Messrs. Crowe and Cavalcaselle, while discussing 
the question of his birthplace and his early training, ob- 
serve, what IS no doubt true, that there are no traces of 
good sculpture in Pisa antecedent to the Baptistery pulpit 
of 1260, and remark that for such a phenomenon as the 
sudden appearance of this masterpiece it is needful to 
seek some antecedents elsewhere/ This leads them to 
ask whether Niccola did not owe his origin and education 
to some other part of Italy. Finding at Ravello, near 
Amalfi, a pulpit sculptured in 1272 by Niccola di Barto- 
lommeo da Foggia, they suggest that a school of stone- 
carvers may have flourished at Foggia, and that Niccola 
Pisano, in spite of his signing himself Pisanus on the 
Baptistery pulpit, may have been an Apulian trained in 
that school. The arguments adduced in favor of that 
hypothesis are that Niccola's father, though commonly 

* * History of Painting in Italy,' vol. i. chap. iv. 



So8 APPENDIX I. 

believed to have been Ser Pietro da Siena, was perhaps 
called Pietro di Apulia/ and that meritorious artists cer- 
tainly existed at Foggia and Trani. Yet the resemblance 
of style between the pulpits at Ravello [1272] and Pisa 
[1260], if that indeed exists (whereof hereafter more must 
be said), might be used to prove that Niccola da Foggia 
learned his art from Niccola Pisano, instead of the con- 
trary ; nor again, supposing the Apulian school to have 
flourished before 1260, is it inconsistent with the tradition 
of Niccola's life that he should have learned the sculptor's 
craft while working in his youth at Naples. For the rest, 
Messrs. Crowe and Cavalcaselle dismiss the story of Pi- 
sano's studying the antique bass-reliefs at Pisa with con- 
tempt ;" but they omit to notice the actual transcripts 
from those marbles introduced into his first pulpit. Again, 
they assume that the lunette at Lucca was one of his 
latest works, giving precedence to the pulpits of Pisa and 
Siena and the fountain of Perugia. A comparison of style 
no doubt renders this view plausible ; for the lunette at 
Lucca is superior to any other of Pisano's works as a 
composition. 

The full discussion of these points is rendered impos- 
sible by the want of contemporary information, and each 
student must, therefore, remain contented with his own 
hypothesis. Yet something must be said with regard to 
the Ravello pulpit that plays so important a part in the ar- 
gument of the learned historians of Italian painting. Un- 
less a strong similarity between it and Pisano's pulpits can 
be proved, their hypothesis carries with it no persuasion. 

The pulpit in the cathedral of Ravello is formed like 
an ambo of the antique type. That is to say, it is a long 
parallelogram with flat sides, raised upon pillars, and ap- 

' Loc. cit. p. 127, note. * Loc. cit p. 127. 



THE PULPITS OF PISA AND RA VELLO. 509 

proached by a flight of steps. These steps are inclosed 
within richly-ornamented walls, and stand distinct from 
the pulpit; a short bridge connects the two. The six 
pillars supporting the ambo itself are slender twisted 
columns with classic capitals. Three rest on lions, three 
on lionesses, admirably carved in different attitudes. A 
small projection on the north side of the pulpit sustains 
an eagle standing on a pillar, and spreading out his wings 
to bear an open book. On the arch over the entrance to 
the staircase projects the head of Sigelgaita, wife of Nic- 
cola Rufolo, the donor of the pulpit to the church, sculp, 
tured in the style of the Roman decadence, between two 
profile medallions in low relief.^ The material of the 
whole is fair white marble, enriched with mosaics, and 
wrought into beautiful scroll-work of acanthus leaves and 
other Romanesque adornments. An inscription, ''Ego 
Magister Nicolaus de Bartholomeode Fogia Marmorarius 
hoc opus feci ; and another, '^ Lap sis millenis bis centum 
bisque trigenis XPI. bissenis annis ab origine pleniSy* indi- 
cate the artist's name and the date of the work. 

It is difficult to understand how any one could trace 
such a resemblance between this rectangular ambo and 
the hexagonal structure in the Pisan Baptistery as would 
justify them in asserting both to be the products of the 
same school. The pulpit of Niccola da Foggia does not 
materially differ from other ambones in Italy — from several, 
for instance, in Amalfi and Ravello ; while the distinctive 
features of Niccola Pisano's work — the combination of 
classically-studied bass-reliefs with Gothic principles of 

* Mr. Perkins, following the suggestion of Panza, in his * Istoria 
dell' Antica Republica d'Amalfi,' is inclined to think that this head rep- 
resents, not Sigelgaita, but Joanna II. of Naples, and is therefore 
more than a century later in date than the pulpit. See ' Italian Sculp- 
tors,' p. 51. 



5IO APPENDIX /. 

construction, the feeling for artistic unity in the compo- 
sition of groups, the mastery over plastic form, and the 
detached allegorical figures — are noticeable only by their 
total absence from it. What is left by way of similarity 
is a sculpturesque refinement in Sigelgaita's portrait, not 
unworthy of Pisano's own chisel. This, however, is but 
a slender point whereon to base so large a pyramid of 
pure conjecture. Surely we must look elsewhere than at 
Ravello or at Foggia for the origin of Niccola Pisano. 

Why then should we reject tradition in this instance? 
Messrs. Crowe and Cavaicaselle reply; because the sculp- 
ture of no Tuscan city before his period is good enough to 
have led up to him. Yet this may be contested ; and at all 
events it will not be easy to prove from the Ravello head 
of Sigelgaita that a more advanced school existed in the 
south. The fact is that the art of the stone-carvers or 
marmorarii had never entirely died out since the days of 
Roman greatness ; nor was Niccola without respectable 
predecessors in the very town of Lucca, where he produced 
the first masterpiece of modern sculpture. The circular 
font of S. Frediano, for example, carved with figures in 
high relief by a certain Robertus of the twelfth century, 
combines the Romanesque mannerism with the naivete of 
mediaeval fancy. I might point in particular to two 
knights seated on one horse In what I take to be the com- 
pany of Pharaoh crossing the Red Sea, as an instance of a 
successful attempt to escape from the formalism of a de- 
cayed style. At the same time the general effect of the 
embossed work of this font is fine ; nor do we fail to per- 
ceive that the artist retained some portion of the classic 
feeling for grandiose and monumental composition. Far 
less noteworthy, yet still not utterly despicable, is the bass- 
relief of Biduinus over the side-door of S. Salvatore at 



THE PULPITS OF PISA AND RA VELLO. 511 

Lucca. What Niccola added of indefeasibly his own to 
the style of these continuators of a dead tradition was feel- 
ing for the beauty of classical work in a good age, and 
through that feeling a more perfect sympathy with nature. 
It is just at this point that the old tale about the sar- 
cophagus of the Countess Beatrice conveys not only the 
letter but the spirit of the fact. Niccola's genius, no less 
vivid and life-giving than that of Giotto, infused into the 
hard and formal manner of his immediate predecessors 
true nature and true art. Between the bass-relief of S. 
Salvatore and the bass-relief over the north door of the 
Duomo at Lucca there is indeed a broad gulf, yet such as 
might have been passed at one bound by a master into 
whose soul the beauty of a fragment of Greek art had sunk, 
and who had received at his birth the gift of a creative 
genius. 



APPENDIX II. 

Michael Angela* s Sonnets, 

After the death of Michael Angelo, the manuscripts of 
his sonnets, madrigals, and other poems, written at various 
periods of his life, and well known to his intimate friends, 
passed into the hands of his nephew, Lionardo Buonarroti. 
From Lionardo they descended to his son, Michael Angelo, 
who was himself a poet of some mark. This grand-nephew 
of the sculptor prepared them for the press, and gave them 
to the world in 1623. On his redaction the commonly 
received version of the poems rested until 1863, when 
Signor Cesare Guasti of Florence, having gained access to 
the original manuscripts, published a critical edition, pre- 
serving every peculiarity of the autograph, and adding a 
prose paraphrase for the explanation of the text. 

The younger Michael Angelo, working in an age of 
literary pedantry and moral prudery, fancied that it was 
his duty to refine the style of his great ancestor, and to 
remove allusions open to ignorant misconstruction. In- 
stead, therefore, of giving an exact transcript of the original 
poems, he set himself to soften down their harshness, to 
clear away their obscurity, to amplify, transpose, and muti- 
late according to his own ideas of syntax, taste, and rhet- 
oric. On the Dantesque ruggedness of Michael Angelo 
he engrafted the prettiness of the seventeenth Petrarchisti ; 
and where he thought the morality of the poems was ques- 



MICHAEL ANGELaS SONNETS. 513 

tionable, especially in the case of those addressed to Cava- 
Jieri, he did not hesitate to introduce such alterations as 
destroyed their obvious intention. In order to understand 
the effect of this method, it is only necessary to compare 
the autograph as printed by Guasti with the version of 
1623. In Sonnet xxxi., for example, the two copies agree 
in only one line, while the remaining thirteen are distorted 
and adorned with superfluous conceits by the over-scrupu- 
lous but not too conscientious editor of 1623.' 

Michael Angelo's poems, even after his grand-nephew 
had tried to reduce them to lucidity and order, have always 
been considered obscure and crabbed. Nor can it be pre- 
tended that they gain in smoothness and clearness by the 
restoration of the true readings. On the contrary, instances 
of defective grammar, harsh elisions, strained metaphors, 
and incomplete expressions are multiplied. The difficulty 
of comprehending the sense is rather increased than dimin- 
ished, and the obstacles to a translator become still more 
insurmountable than Wordsworth found them.' This 
being undoubtedly the case, the value of Guasti's edition 
for students of Michael Angelo is nevertheless inesti- 
mable. We read now for the first time what the greatest 
man of the sixteenth century actually wrote, and are able 
to enter, without the interference of a fictitious veil, into 
the shrine of his own thought and feeling. His sonnets 
form the best commentary on Michael Angelo's solitary 

' See Guasti's ' Rime di Michel Agnolo Buonarroti,' Firenzi, 1863 
p. 189. The future references will be made to that edition. 

* ' I can translate, and have translated, two books of Ariosto at the 
rate nearly of one hundred lines a day; but so much meaning has 
been put by Michael Angelo into so little room, and that meaning 
sometimes so excellent in itself, that I found the difficulty of translating 
him insurmountable. -Note to Wordsworth's English version oi 
some sonnets of Michael Angelo. 



514 APPENDIX II. 

life and on his sublime ideal of art. This reflection has 
guided me in the choice of those now offered in English, 
as an illustration of the chapter in this volume devoted 
to their author's biography. 

Though the dates of Michael Angelo's compositions 
are conjectural, it may be assumed that the two sonnets on 
Dante were written when he was himself in exile. We 
know that, while sojourning in the house of Gian Francesco 
Aldovrandini at Bologna, he used to spend a portion of his 
time in reading Dante aloud to his protector ; ^ and the in- 
dignation expressed against Florence, then as ever fickle 
and ungrateful, the gente avara^ invidiosa^ e superba^ to use 
Dante's own words, seems proper to a period of just 
resentment. Still there is no certainty that they belong to 
1495 ; for throughout his long life Michael Angelo was 
occupied with Dante. A story told of him in 1506, 
together with the dialogues reported by Donato Gian- 
notti, prove that he was regarded by his fellow-citizens as 
an authority upon the meaning of the Divine Comedy.' In 
1 5 18, when the Florentine Academy petitioned Leo X. to 
transport the bones of Dante from Ravenna to Florence, 
Michael Angelo subscribed the document and offered to 
erect a statue worthy of the poet.^ How deeply the study 
of Dante influenced his art appears not only in the lower 
part of the Last Judgment : we feel that source of stern 
and lofty inspiration in his style at large ; nor can we reckon 
what the world lost when his volume of drawings in illus- 
tration of the Divine Comedy perished at sea.* The two 
following sonnets, therefore, whenever written, may be 

' See above, p. 389. 

' See Gotti's Life, p. 48, and Giannotti's works (Firenze, Le Mon- 
nier, 1850), quoted by Gotti, pp. 249-257. 
' See Appendix to Gotti's Life, No. 25. 
* See Gotti's Life, p. 256. 



MICHAEL ANGELO'S SONNETS. 51c 

taken as expressing his settled feeling about the first and 
greatest of Italian poets : ^ 

DAL CIEL DISCESE. 

From heaven his spirit came, and robed in clay 

The realms of justice and of mercy trod, 

Then rose a living man to gaze on God, 
That he might make the truth as clear as day. 
For that pure star that brightened with his ray 

The ill-deserving nest where I was bom. 

The whole wide world would be a prize to scorn ; 
None but his Maker can due guerdon pay. 

I speak of Dante, whose high work remains 
Unknown, unhonored by that thankless brood. 
Who only to just men deny their wage. 

Were I but he ! Born for like lingering pains, 
Against his exile coupled v^th his good 
I'd gladly change the world's best heritage ! 

QUANTE DIRNI SI DE'. 

No tongue can tell of him what should be told, 

For on blind eyes his splendor shines too strong ; 

'Twere easier to blame those who wrought him wrong. 
Than sound his least praise with a mouth of gold. 
He to explore the place of pain was bold, 

Then soared to God, to teach our souls by song ; 

The gates heaven oped to bear his feet along; 
Against his just desire his country rolled. 

Thankless I call her, and to her own pain 
The nurse of fell mischance ; for sign take this. 
That ever to the best she deals more scorn : 

Among a thousand proofs let one remain ; 

Though ne'er was fortune more unjust than his. 
His equal or his better ne'er was bom. 

About the date of the two next sonnets there is less 
doubt. The first was clearly written when Michael Angelo 
was smarting under a sense of the ill-treatment he received 

iGuasti, pp. 1 53-1 55.. _ 



5i6 APPENDIX 11. 

from Julius The second, composed at Rome, is interesting 
as the only proof we possess of the impression made upon 
his mind by the anomalies of the Papal rule. Here, in the 
capital of Christendom, he writes, holy things are sold for 
money to be used in warfare, and the pontiff, quel nel 
manto, paralyzes the powers of the sculptor by refusing 
him employment. ^ 

SIGNOR, SE VERO E. 

My Lord ! if ever ancient saw spake sooth, 

Hear this, which saith : Who can, doth never wiU. 

Lo ! thou hast lent thine ear to fables still, 
Rewarding those who hate the name of truth. 
I am thy drudge and have been from my youth — 

Thine, like the rays which the sun's circle fill ; 

Yet of my dear time's waste thou think'st no ill : 
The more I toil, the less I move thy ruth. 

Once 'twas my hope to raise me by thy height ; 
But 'tis the balance and the powerful sword 
Of Justice, not false Echo, that we need. 

Heaven, as it seems, plants virtue in despite 
Here on the earth, if this be our reward — 
To seek for fruit on trees too dry to breed. 

QUA SI FA ELMI. 

Here helms and swords are made of chalices : 
The blood of Christ is sold so much the quart : 
His cross and thorns are spears and shields ; and short 

Must be the time ere even His patience cease. 

Nay let Him come no more to raise the fees 
Of fraud and sacrilege beyond report ! 
For Rome still slays and sells Him at the court. 

Where paths are closed to virtue's fair increase. 

Now were fit time for me to scrape a treasure. 
Seeing that work and gain are gone ; while he 
Who wears the robe is my Medusa still. 

Perchance in heaven poverty is a pleasure : 
But of that better life what hope have we. 
When the blessed banner leads to naught but ill ? 



Guasti, pp. 156, 157. 



MICHAEL ANGELO'S SONNETS. 517 

A third sonnet of this period is intended to be half 
burlesque, and, therefore, is composed a coda^ as the Ital- 
ians describe the lengthened form of the conclusion. It 
was written while Michael Angelo was painting the roof 
of the Sistine, and was sent to his friend Giovanni da 
Pistoja. The effect of this work, as Vasari tells us, on his 
eyesight was so injurious that, for some time after its 
completion, he could only read by placing the book ot 
manuscript above his head and looking up.* 

l' HO GIA FATTO UN GOZZO. 

I've grown a goitre by dwelling in this den — 

As cats from stagnant streams in Lombardy, 

Or in what other land they hap to be — 
Which drives the belly close beneath the chin : 
My beard turns up to heaven ; my nape falls in, 

Fixed on my spine : my breast-bone visibly 

Grows like a harp : a rich embroidery 
Bedews my face from brush-drops thick and thin. 
My loins into my paunch Hke levers grind ; 

My buttock like a crupper bears my weight ; 

My feet unguided wander to and fro ; 
In front my sldn grows loose and long ; behind. 

By bending it becomes more taut and strait ; 

Backward I strain me like a Syrian bow : 

Whence false and quaint, I know. 

Must be the fruit of squinting brain and eye ; 

For ill can aim the gun that bends awry. 
Come then, Giovanni, \.rj 

To succor my dead pictures and my fame ; 

Since foul I fare and painting is my shame. 

The majority of the sonnets are devoted to love and 
beauty, conceived in the spirit of exalted Platonism. They 
are supposed to have been written in the latter period of 
his life, when he was about sixty years of age ; and though 
we do not know for certain to whom they were in every case 
* Guasti, p. 1 58. 



5i8 APPENDIX II. 

addressed, they may be used in confirmation of what I have 
said about his admiration for Vittoria Colonna and Tom- 
maso Cavalieri.^ The following, with its somewhat ob- 
scure adaptation of a Platonic theory of creation to his 
own art, was probably composed soon after Vittoria 
Colonna's death.'* 

SE 'l mio rozzo martello. 

When my rude hammer to the stubborn stone 
Gives human shape, now that, now this, at will. 
Following his hand who wields and guides it still. 

It moves upon another's feet alone. 

But He who dwells in heaven all things doth fill 
With beauty by pure motions of His own ; 
And since tools fashion tools which else were none. 

His life makes all that lives with living skill. 

Now, for that every stroke excels the more 

The closer to the forge it still ascend, 

Her soul that quickened mine hath sought the sides : 
Wherefore I find my toil will never end, 

If God, the great artificer, denies 

That tool which was my only aid before. 

The next is peculiarly valuable, as proving with what 
intense and religious fervor Michael Angelo addressed 
himself to the worship of intellectual beauty. He alone, in 
that age of sensuality and animalism, pierced through the 
form of flesh and sought the divine idea it imprisoned :' 

PER RITORNAR LA. 

As one who will reseek her home of light. 

Thy form immortal to this prison-house 

Descended, like an angel piteous. 
To heal all hearts and make the whole world bright. 
'Tis this that thralls my heart in love's delight. 

Not thy clear face of beauty glorious ; 

For he who harbors virtue still will choose 
To love what neither years nor death can blight. 



* See above, pp. 433-435. ' Guasti, p. 226, 

' lb. p. 218. 



MICHAEL ANGELGS SONATETS, 519 

So lares it ever with things high and rare, 
Wrought in the sweat of nature ; heaven above 
Showers on their birth the blessings of her prime 

Nor hath God deigned to show Himself elsewhere 
More clearly than in human forms sublime ; 
Which, since they image Him, compel my love. 

The same Platonic theme is slightly varied in the two 
following sonnets -} 

SPIRTO BEN NATO. 

Choice soul, in whom, as in a glass, we see. 
Mirrored in thy pure form and delicate. 
What beauties heaven and nature can create. 

The paragon of all their works to be ! 

Fair soul, in whom love, pity, piety. 

Have found a home, as from thy outward state 
We clearly read, and are so rare and great 

That they adorn none other like to thee ! 

Love takes me captive ; beauty binds my soul ; 
Pity and mercy with their gentle eyes 
Wake in my heart a hope that can not cheat. 

What law, what destiny, what fell control. 
What cruelty, or late or soon, denies 
That death should spare perfection so complete ? 

DAL DOLCE PIANTO. 

From sweet laments to bitter joys, from peace 

Eternal to a brief and hollow truce. 

How have I fallen ! — when 'tis truth we lose. 
Mere sense sundves our reason's dear decease. 
I know not if my heart bred this disease. 

That still more pleasing grows with growing use ; 

Or else thy face, thine eyes, in which the hues 
And fires of Paradise dart ecstasies. 

Thy beauty is no mortal thing; 'twas sent 

From heaven on high to make our earth divine : 

Wherefore, though wasting, burning, I'm content; 
For in thy sight what could I do but pine ? 

If God himself thus rules my destiny. 

Who, when I die, can lay the blame on thee ? 



*Guasti, pp. 182, 210. 



520 APPENDIX II, 

The next is saddened by old age and death. Love has 
yielded to piety, and is only remembered as what used to 
be. Yet in form and feeling this is quite one of the 
most beautiful in the series supposed to refer to Vittoria 
Colonna -} 

TORNAMI AL TEMPO. 

Bring back the time when blind desire ran free. 

With bit and rein too loose to curb his flight ; 

Give back the buried face, once angel-bright. 
That hides in earth all comely things from me ; 
Bring back those journeys ta'en so toilsomely, 

So toilsome-slow to him whose hairs are white ; 

Those tears and flames that in one breast unite; 
If thou wilt once more take thy fill of me ! 

Yet Love ! Suppose it true that thou dost thrive 

Only on bitter honey-dews of tears, 

Small profit hast thou of a weak old man. 
My soul that toward the other shore doth strive. 

Wards off" thy darts with shafts of holier fears ; 

And fire feeds ill on brands no breath can fan. 

After this it only remains to quote the celebrated sonnet 
used by Varchi for his dissertation, the best known of all 
Michael Angelo's poems.^ The thought is this: just as a 
sculptor hews from a block of marble the form that lies 
concealed within, so the lover has to extract from his lady's 
heart the life or death of his soul. 

NON HA L'OTTIMO ARTISTA. 

The best of artists hath no thought to show 
Which the rough stone in its superfluous shell 
Doth not include : to break the marble spell 

Is all the hand that serves the brain can do. 



* Guasti, p. 212. 

^ Delivered before the Florentine Academy in 1 546. See Guasti, 
p. 173, for the sonnet, and p. Ixxv. for the dissertation. See also 
Gotti, p. 249, for Michael Angelo's remarks upon the latter. 



MICHAEL ANGELaS SONNETS, 52! 

The ill I shun, the good I seek, even so 
In thee, fair lady, proud, ineffable. 
Lies hidden : but the art I wield so well 

Works adverse to my wish, and lays me low. 

Therefore not love, nor thy transcendent face, 
Nor cruelty, nor fortune, nor disdain. 
Cause my mischance, nor fate, nor destiny ; 

Since in thy heart thou earnest death and grace 
Inclosed together, and my worthless brain 
Can draw forth only death to feed on me. 

The fire of youth was not extinct, we feel, after reading 
these last sonnets. There is, indeed, an almost pathetic 
intensity of passion in the recurrence of Michael Angelo's 
thoughts to a sublime love on the verge of the grave. Not 
less important in their bearing on his state of feeling are 
the sonnets addressed to Cavalieri ; and though his modern 
editor shrinks from putting a literal interpretation upon 
them, I am convinced that we must accept them simply as 
an expression of the artist's homage for the worth and 
beauty of an excellent young man. The two sonnets I 
intend to quote next ' were written, according to Varchi's 
direct testimony, for Tommaso Cavalieri, * in whom,* the 
words are Varchi's, * I discovered, besides incomparable 
personal beauty, so much charm of nature, such excellent 
abilities, and such a graceful manner, that he deserved, and 
still deserves, to be the better loved the more he is known.* 
The play of words upon Cavalieri's name in the last line of 
the first sonnet, the evidence of Varchi, and the indirect 
witness of Condivi, together with Michael Angelo's own 
letters,' are sufficient in my judgment to warrant the ex- 
planation I have given above. Nor do I think that the 
doubts expressed by Guasti about the intention of the son- 

' Guasti, pp. 188, 189. 

' See * Archivio Bu>^narroti,' and above, p. 434, note 2. 



522 APPENDIX //. 

nets/ or Gotti's curious theory that the letters, though 
addressed to Cavalieri, were meant for Vittoria Colonna,' 
are much more honorable to Michael Angelo's reputation 
than the garbling process whereby the verses were ren- 
dered unintelligible in the edition of 1623. 

A CHE pii) debb' 10. 

Why should I seek to ease intense desire 
With still more tears and windy words of grief. 
When heaven, or late or sooq, sends no relief 

To souls whom love hath robed around v^th fire? 

Why need my aching heart to death aspire 
When all must die ? Nay, death beyond belief 
Unto these eyes would be both sweet and brieC 

Since in my sum of woes all joys expire ! 

Therefore because I can not shun Int blow 
I rather seek, say who must rule my breast. 
Gliding between her gladness and her woe ? 

If only chains and bands can make me blest, 
No marvel if alone and bare I go 
And armed Knight's captive and slave coniessed. 

VEGGIO CO' BEI VOSTRI OCCHI. 

With your fair eyes a charming light I see, 

For which my own blind eyes would peer In vain ; 

Stayed by your feet the burden I sustain 
Which my lame feet find all too strong for me; 
Wingless upon your pinions forth I fly ; 

Heavenward your spirit stirreth me to strain ; 

E'en as you will, I blush and blanch again, 
Freeze in the sun, burn 'neath a frosty sky. 

Your will includes and is the lord of mine ; 

Life to my thoughts within your heart is given ; 

My words begin to breathe upon your breath: 
Like to the moon am I, that can not shine 

Alone ; for lo ! our eyes see naught in heaven 

Save what the living sun illumineth. 

> Rime, p. xiv. ' Gotti's Life, pp. 231-233. 



MICHAEL ANGELaS SONNETS. 523 

Whether we are justified In assigning the following pair 
to the Cavalieri series is more doubtful. They seem, how- 
ever, to proceed from a similar mood of the poet's mind : ^ 

S'UN CASTO AMOR. 

If love be chaste, if virtue conquer ill. 
If fortune bind both lovers in one bond, 
If either at the other's grief despond, 

If both be governed by one life, one will ; 

If in two bodies one soul triumph still, 
Raising the twain from earth to heaven beyond. 
If love vdth one blow and one golden wand 

Have power both smitten breasts to pierce and thrill ; 

If each the other love, himself foregoing, 
With such delight, such savor, and so well. 
That both to one sole end their wills combine ; 

If thousands of these thoughts all thought outgoing 
Fail the least part of their firm love to tell ; 
Say, can mere angry spite this knot untwine ? 

COLUI CHE FECE. 

He who ordained, when first the world began. 
Time that was not before creation's hour. 
Divided it, and gave the sun's high power ^ 

To rule the one, the moon the other span : 

Thence fate and changeful chance and fortune's ban 
Did in one moment down on mortals shower : 
To me they portioned darkness for a dower ; 

Dark hath my lot been since I was a man. 

Myself am ever mine own counterfeit ; 

And as deep night grows still more dim and dun. 

So still of more misdoing must I rue : 
Meanwhile this solace to my soul is sweet, 

That my black night doth make more clear the sun 

Which at your birth was given to wait on you. 

A sonnet written for Luigi del Riccio on the death of his 
friend Cecchino Bracci is curious on account of its conceit.* 

> Guasti, pp. 190-202. • lb. p. 162. 



524 APPENDIX II. 

Michael Angelo says: 'Cecchino, whom you loved, is 
dead ; and if I am to make his portrait, I can only do so by 
drawing you, in whom he still lives.' Here, again, we trace 
the Platonic conception of love as nothing if not spiritual, 
and of beauty as a form that finds its immortality within 
the lover's soul. This Cecchino was a boy who died at 
the age of seventeen. Michael Angelo wrote his epicedion 
in several centuries of verses, distributed among his 
friends in the form of what he terms polizziniy as though 
they were trifles. 

A PENA PRIMA. 

Scarce had I seen for the first time his eyes 
Which to thy living eyes are life and light, 
When closed at last in death's injurious night 

He opened them on God in Paradise. 

I know it and I weep, too late made wise : 

Yet was the fault not mine ; for death's fell spite 
Robbed my desire of that supreme delight. 

Which in thy better memory never dies. 

Therefore, Luigi, if the task be mine 

To make unique Cecchino smile in stone 
Forever, now that earth hath made him dim, 

If the beloved within the lover shine, 

Since art without him can not work alone. 
Thee must I <:arve to tell the world of him. 

In contrast with the philosophical obscurity of many of 
the sonnets hitherto quoted, I place the following address 
to Night, one, certainly, of Michael Angelo's most beau- 
tiful and characteristic compositions, as it is also the most 
transparent in style : ^ 

O NOTT', O DOLCE TEMPO. 

O Night, O sweet though somber span of time ! 
All things find rest upon their journey's end — 
Whoso hath praised thee well doth apprehend ; 

And whoso honors thee hath wisdom's prime. 



* Guasti, p. 205. 



MICHAEL ANGELaS SONNETS, 525 

Our cares thou canst to quietude sublime, 
For dews and darkness are of peace the friend ; 
Often by thee in dreams upborne I wend 

From earth to heaven, where yet I hope to climb. 

Thou shade of Death, through whom the soul at length 
Shuns pain and sadness hostile to the heart. 
Whom mourners find their last and sure relief ! 

Thou dost restore our suffering flesh to strength, 
Driest our tears, assuagest every smart. 
Purging the spirits of the pure from grief. 

The religious sonnets have been reserved to the last. 
These were composed in old age, when the early impres- 
sions of Savonarola's teaching revived, and when Michael 
Angelo had grown to regard even his art and the beauty- 
he had loved so purely as a snare. If we did not bear in 
mind the piety expressed throughout his correspondence, 
their ascetic tone, and the remorse they seem to indicate, 
would convey a painful sense of cheerlessness and disap- 
pointment. As it is, they strike me as the natural utter- 
ance of a profoundly devout and somewhat melancholy 
man, in whom religion has survived all other interests, and 
who, reviewing his past life of fame and toil, finds that the 
sole reality is God. The two first of these compositions 
are addressed to Giorgio Vasari.* 

GIUNTO E GlX. 
Now hath my life across a stormy sea 

Like a frail bark reached that wide port where all 

Are bidden ere the final judgment fall, 
Of good or evil deeds to pay the fee. 
Now know I well how that fond fantasy 

Which made my soul the worshiper and thraU 

Of earthly art is vain ; how criminal 
Is that which all men seek unwillingly. 



* Guasti, pp. 230-232. 



526 APPENDIX II. 

Those amorous thoughts which were so lightly dressed, 
What are they when the double death is nigh ? 
The one I know for sure, the other dread. 

Painting nor sculpture now can lull to rest 
My soul that turns to His great love on high 
Whose arms to clasp us on the cross were spread. 



LE FAVOLE DEL MONDO. 

The fables of the world have filched away 

The time I had for thinking upon God ; 

His grace lies buried 'neath oblivion's sod, 
Whence springs an evil crop of sins alway. 
What makes another wise, leads me astray, 

Slow to discern the bad path I have trod : 

Hope fades ; but still desire ascends that God 
May free me from self-love, my sure decay. 

Shorten half-way my road to heaven from earth ? 

Dear Lord, I can not even half-way rise, 

Unless Thou help me on this pilgrimage : 
Teach me to hate the world so little worth. 

And all the lovely things I once did prize ; 

That endless life not death may be my wage. 

The same note is struck in the following, which 
breathes the spirit of a Penitential Psalm : * 



CARICO D* ANNI. 

Burdened with years and full of sinfulness. 
With evil custom grown inveterate. 
Both deaths I dread that close before me wait. 

Yet feed my heart on poisonous thoughts no less. 

No strength I find in mine own feebleness 
To change or life or love or use or fate 
Unless Thy heavenly guidance come, though late, 

Which only helps and stays our nothingness. 



* Guasti, pp. 244, 245. 



MICHAEL ANGELO'S SONAETS. 527 

'Tis not enough, dear Lord, to make me yearn 
For that celestial home, where yet my soul 
May be new made, and not, as erst, of naught : 

Nay, ere Thou strip her mortal vestment, turn 
My steps toward the steep ascent, that whole 
And pure before Thy face she may be brought. 

In reading the two next, we may remember that, at the 
end of his life, Michael Angelo was occupied with designs 
for a picture of the Crucifixion, which he never executed, 
though he gave a drawing of Christ upon the cross to 
Vittoria Colonna ; and that his last work in marble was 
the unfinished Fieta in the Duomo at Florence.* 

SCARCO D' UN IMPORTUNA. 

Freed from a burden sore and grievous band. 

Dear Lord, and from this wearying world untied. 

Like a frail bark I turn me to Thy side, 
As from a fierce storm to a tranquil land. 
Thy thorns, Thy nails, and either bleeding hand, 

With Thy mild gentle piteous face, provide 

Promise of help and mercies multiplied. 
And hope that yet my soul secure may stand. 

Let not Thy holy eyes be just to see 
My evil past. Thy chastened ears to hear 
And stretch the arm of judgment to my crime : 

Let Thy blood only lave and succor me, 
Yielding more perfect pardon, better cheer. 
As older still I grow with lengthening time. 

NON FUR MEN LIETI. 

Not less elate than smitten with wild woe 
To see not them but Thee by death undone. 
Were those blest souls, when Thou above the sun 

Didst raise, by dying, men that lay so low : 

Elate, since freedom from all ills that flow 

From their first fault for Adam's race was won ; 
Sore smitten, since in torment fierce God's son 

Served servants on the cruel cross below. 



' Guasti, pp. 241-245. 



528 APPENDIX II, 

Heaven showed she knew Thee, who Thou wert and whence, 

Veiling her eyes above the riven earth ; 

The mountains trembled and the seas were troubled : 
He took the Fathers from hell's darkness dense : 

The torments of the damned fiends redoubled 

Man only joyed, who gained baptismal birth. 

The collection of his poems is closed with yet another 
sonnet in the same lofty strain of prayer, and faith, and 
hope in God :' 

MENTRE M' ATTRISTA. 

Mid weariness and woe I find some cheer 

In thinking of the past, when I recall 

My weakness and my sins and reckon all 
The vain expense of days that disappear : 
This cheers by making, ere I die, more clear 

The frailty of what men delight miscall ; 

But saddens me to think how rarely fall 
God's grace and mercies in life's latest year. 

For though Thy promises our faith compel. 
Yet, Lord, what man shall venture to maintain 
That pity will condone our long neglect ? 

Still, from Thy blood poured forth we know full well 
How without measure was Thy martyr's pain. 
How measureless the gifts we dare expect. 

From the thought of Dante, through Plato, to the 
thought of Christ : so our study of Michael Angelo s 
sonnets has carried us. In communion with these highest 
souls Michael Angelo habitually lived ; for he was born 
of their lineage, and was like them a life-long alien on 
the earth. 

> Guasti, p. 245. 



APPENDIX III. 

Chroiwlogical Tables of the Principal Artists mentioned 
in this Volume, 

The lists which follow have been drawn up with a view 
to assisting the reader of my chapters on Architecture, 
Sculpture, and Painting. I have only included the more 
prominent names ; and these I have placed in the order of 
their occurrence in the foregoing pages. In compiling 
them, I have consulted the Index to Le Monnier's edition 
of Vasari (1870), Crowe and Cavalcaselle's History of 
Paintingy and Milizia's Dictionary of Architects, 



ARCHITECTS, 



Names 


Bom 


Died 


Page 


Arnolfo di Cambio 


1240 


I31I 


62 


Giotto di Bondone 


1276 


1337 


(^z 


Andrea Orcagna . 


.... 


about 1369 


^l 


Filippo Brunelleschi . 


1377 


1446 


73 


Leo Battista Albert! . 


1405 


1472 


74 


Michellozzo Michellozzi 


1391 


1472 


76 


Benedetto da Majano . 


1442 


1497 


76 


Giuliano da San Gallo. 


1445 


1516 


76 


Antonio da San Gallo . 


1455 


1534? 


76 


Antonio Filarete . 


.... 


1465? 


77 



53© 



APPENDIX III. 

ARCHITECTS — Continued. 



Names 


Bom 


Died 


Page 


Bramante Lazzari 


1444 


1514 


81 


Cristoforo Rocchi 


. • • • 


. • . • 


82 


Ventura Vitoni . 


. • . • 


• • • • 


83 


Raffaello Santi . 


1483 


1520 


83 


Giulio Romano . 


1499 


1546 


84 


Baldassare Peruzzi 


I481 


1536 


84 


Jacopo Sansovino 


1477 


1570 


85 


Michele Sanmicheli . 


1484 


1559 


86 


Baccio d'Agnolo . 


1462 


1543 


86 


Michael Angelo Buo- ) 
narroti . . j 


1475 


1564 


87 


Andrea Palladio . 


1513 


1580 


94 


Giacomo Barozzi. 


1507 


1573 


95 


Vincenzo Scamozzi 


1552 


1616 


96 


Galeazzo Alessi . 


1500 


1572 


96 


Bartolommeo Amma- ) 
nati ... J 


151I 


1592 


96 



SCULPTORS, 



Names 


Bom 


Died 


Page 


Niccola Pisano . 


after 1200 


1278 


lOI 


Giovanni Pisano . 


about 1240 


1320 


no 


Lorenzo Maitani . 


.... 


1330 


117 


Andrea Pisano 


about 1273 


about 1349 


119 


Giotto di Bondone 


1276 


1337 


119 


Nino Pisano 


.... 


about 1360 


123 


Giovanni Balduccio 


about 1300 


about 1347 


123 



SCULPTORS, 
SCULPTORS — continued. 



531 



Names 


Bom 


Died 


Page 


Filippo Calendario 


.... 


1355 


123 


Andrea Orcagna . 


• • • • 


about 1369 


124 


Lorenzo Ghiberti 


1378 


1455 


127 


Giacomo della Querela 


1374 


1438 


127 


Filippo Brunelleschi . 


1377 


1446 


127 


Donatello 


1386 


1466 


136 


Andrea Verocchio 


1435 


1488 


141 


Alessandro Leopardi . 


.... 


after 1522 


143 


Antonio Pollajuolo 


1429 


1498 


145 


Piero Pollajuolo . 


I441 


1489? 


147 


Luca della Robbia 


1400 


1482 


148 


Agastino di Duccio 


.... 


after 1461 


150 


Antonio Rossellino 


1427 


1478? 


153 


Matteo Civitali. . 


1435 


1501 


156 


Mino da Fiesole . 


143 1 


1484 


158 


Desiderio da Settignano 


1428 


1464 


159 


Guido Mazzoni . 


. • • • 


1518 


163 


Antonio Begarelli 


1479 


about 1565 


164 


Antonio Amadeo . 


1447? 


about 1520 


164 


Andrea Contucci . 


1460 


1529 


166 


Jacopo Sansovino 


1477 


1570 


167 


Michael Angelo Buo- ) 








narroti 


1475 


1564 


171 


Raflfaello da Montelupo 


1505 


1567 


172 


Giovonni Angelo) 








Montorsoli . C 
} 


1507 


1563 


172 


Baccio Bandinelli 


1493 


1560 


173 



532 



APPENDIX IIL 
SCULPTORS — continued. 



Names 


Bom 


Died 


Page 


Bartolommeo Amma- ) 
nati ... J 


15" 


1592 


173 


Benvenuto Cellini 


1500 


1571 


176 


Gian Bologna 


1524 


1608 


176 



PAINTERS. 



Names 


Born 


Died 


Page 


Giovanni Cimabue 


1240? 




1302 ? 


187 


Giotto di Bondone 


1276 




1337 


189 


Andrea Orcagna . 


.... 


about 


1369 


199 


Ambrogio Lorenzetti . 


.... 


about 


1348 


200 


Pietro Lorenzetti 


.... 


about 


1350 


200 


Taddeo Gaddi 


about 1300 




1366 


205 


Francesco Traini . 


.... 


after 


1378 


207 


Duccio di Buoninsegna 


.... 


about 


1320 


215 


Simone Martini . 


1285? 




1344 


217 


Taddeo di Bartolo 


about 1362 




1422 


218 


Spinello Aretino . 


.... 




1410 


219 


Masolino da Panicale . 


1384 




1447? 


229 


Masaccio 


1402 




1429 


229 


Paolo Uccello 


1397 




1475 


231 


Andrea del Castagno . 


1396 




1457 


232 


Piero della Francesca . 


1420? 




1506? 


254 


Melozzo da Forli 


about 1438 




1494 


235 


Francesco Squarcione . 


1394 




1474 


236 


Gentile da Fabriano . 


about 1370 


about 


1450 


238 



PAINTERS, 
PAINTERS — continued. 



533 



Names 


Bom 


Died 


Page 


Fra Angelico 


1387 


1455 


239 


Benozzo Gozzoli . 


1420 


1498 


241 


Lippo Lippi 


I412? 


1469 


244 


Filippino Lippi . 


1457 


1504 


247 


Sandro Botticelli . 


1447 


1510 


249 


Piero di Cosimo . 


1462 


1521? 


255 


Domenico Ghirlandajo 


1449 


before 1498 


258 


Andrea Mantegna 


I43I 


1506 


269 


Luca Signorelli . 


about 1 44 1 


1523 


279 


Pietro Perugino . 


1446 


1524 


294 


Bernardo Pinturicchio 


1454 


1513 


301 


Francesco Francia 


1450 


1517 


303 


Fra Bartolommeo . 


1475 


1517 


304 


Mariotto Albertinelli . 


1474 


1515 


305 


Lionardo da Vinci 


1452 


1519 


313 


Raffaello Santi . 


1483 


1520 


328 


Antonio Allegri da 
Correggio 


1494? 


1534 


339 


Michael Angelo Buo- 
narroti 


1475 


1564 


342 


Bartolommeo Vivarini 


• • . . 


after 1499 


361 


Jacopo Bellini . 


1400? 


1464? 


362 


Gentile Bellini . 


1426 


1507 


363 


Vittore Carpaccio 


• • • • 


after 15 19 


364 


Giovanni Bellini 


1427 


1516 


365 


Giorgione . 


1478 


15" 


367 


Tiziano Vecelli . 


1477 


1576 


369 


Paolo Veronese . 


1530 


1588 


369 



534 



APPENDIX III. 

PAINTERS — continued. 



Names 



Tintoretto . 
Giovanni Antonio 

Belttraffio 
Marco d'Oggiono 
Cesare da Sesto . 
Bernardino Luini 
Gaudenzio Ferrari 
Giulio Romano . 
Giovanni da Udine 
Perino del Vaga . 
Marcello Venusti 
Sebastian del Piombo 
Daniele da Volterra 
II Parmigianino . 
Federigo Baroccio 
Andrea del Sarto . 
Jacopo Pontormo 
Angelo Bronzino 
11 Sodoma . 
Baldassare Peruzzi 
Domenico Beccafumi 
Benvenuto Garofalo 
Dosso Dossi 
II Moretto . 
Giovanni Battista 

Moroni 
Giorgio Vasari . 



Bom 



1512 
1467 

about 1470 
• • • • 

about 1460 
1484 
1499 
1487 
1499 

1485 
about 1509 
1504 
1528 
1487 
1494 
1502 

1477 
1481 
i486 
1481 
about 1479 
about 1500 

1510 
15" 



Died 


Page 


1594 


369 


I516 


484 


1530 


484 


about 1524 


484 


after 1530 


485 


1549 


488 


1546 


490 


1564 


490 


1547 


490 


about 1584 


493 


1547 


493 


1566 


493 


1540 


495 


1612 


495 


1531 


497 


IS57 


498 


1572 


499 


1549 


499 


1536 


501 


1551 


501 


1559 


502 


1542 


502 


after 1556 


503 


1578 


503 


1574 


• • • 



H 81- 79 



I.*' 




^"v 










■ % ^'''' A^ ^^. "' .V 













N. MANCHESTER, 
INDIANA 46962 



